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But while no explicit links between VP and the KKK have ever been confirmed, racism doesn’t always arrive wrapped in white robes. Louis,” that it “believes in and promotes inclusion, diversity and equality for this region,” and that it “absolutely reject racism.” These days, the organization does have members of color, along with Jewish members, and it does do philanthropy. Although some historians have argued that the KKK did not adopt that uniform until 1915, the parallel is unmistakable.Įarlier this week, the VPO issued a statement saying it “is dedicated to civic progress, economic contributions and charitable causes in St. A 1928 VP publication describes him as a “beloved despot” who “rules with an iron hand encased in velvet” an 1878 flyer for the parade shows him wearing a peaked white hood and long white robes, clutching two shotguns and a pistol. In 1878, the “city fathers” held their first parade, a propagandistic celebration lionizing wealth and introducing the prophet. That event saw Black and white workers unite to bring freight to a standstill - successful cooperation the upper class read as an assault on the social hierarchy. Louis leaders founded in the wake of the Great Railroad Strike. In its original form, Veiled Prophet loomed as a sharp rejoinder to the city’s laborers, a secret society of the wealthiest St.
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Often, things are exactly what they seem. I felt shame again this week, as people all across the country looked at a man in a white veil and saw the same thing I did over a decade ago. Shame drove me to type “veiled prophet KKK?” into my Google search bar a few days later, shame drove me to untag the photos. I remember how the prophet’s first appearance took me aback, how overt the resemblance was, how little it seemed to faze the crowd around me. When I think about my own attendance at VP, shame is the emotion that swells to the surface. I wonder if that is something Kemper feels, in hindsight, not because I believe her to be racist for walking in a deb ball, but because I believe racism buoyed the systems of white privilege in which we grew up. This camp wondered (and here I am looking at comments on the Cut’s own Instagram) “if this is meant to prompt a dialogue about debutante balls and classism, or shame Ellie Kemper for a choice she made as a teenager?”Ĭlassism is a crucial component of this story, but I also wonder about shame. Still others have defended her, arguing that all of this happened more than two decades ago, when the woman in question was 19 years old, and how unfair, how pointless, to dredge it back up now. The optics alone are atrocious.Īs the photos of Kemper circulated, some called on her to publicly “unclaim” her title others devised names like “KKK Princess,” although, as has been repeated in various explainers on Veiled Prophet this week, the organization shares no known ties to the Klan. Louis elites, and refused to accept Black and Jewish members for the next century. At least for students from the city’s oldest and wealthiest families, VP remains a regular holiday tradition, if not an uncontroversial one: As the internet has discovered, two Confederates founded the organization, inducted white St.
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I attended the same small private high school Kemper did, and within that tiny world, the ball, or “VP” as we referred to it, was an eminently common thing. My first thought went something like, Well, of course. Learning that a teenage Ellie Kemper made her debut at the ball in 1999, I didn’t feel surprised. Louis and attended the ball as a guest, I can tell you that the kids in the feathery caps are her “pages,” and the turbaned white man standing just behind her bridal train is a “Bengal Lancer,” and the over-the-elbow gloves are obligatory, at least until dinner is served. The images bouncing around online this week range from jarring to inexplicable: Here is a man draped in white robes, hiding his face behind little lace curtains here is … sorry, is that Kimmy Schmidt in the ball gown and the opera gloves? Who are those children smiling adoringly up at her, what do they want? Having grown up in St. When the Veiled Prophet Ball became a nationally known quantity on Monday, the prevailing reaction was the reasonable one: shock and confusion. Photo: Jamie Rector/St Louis Post-Dispatch / Polaris Ellie Kemper at the Veiled Prophet Ball in 1999.