Raven Symone is an idiot. I’m tired of trying to give her the benefit of the doubt and I’m tired of trying to figure out what she was really trying to say. To me, she’s like the archetypal child star: smugly ignorant, with a profound lack of education that comes across nearly every time she opens her mouth. I guess The View hired her because they thought the controversies would be good for the show. Not so much.
On Friday’s show, Raven Symone and the ladies were discussing a recent study about implicit racism and names. As in, if an employer gets applications from equally qualified Taniquwa Brown and Emily Jones, Emily Jones is going to get hired almost every time ahead of Taniquwa. And you would think that someone named “Raven Symone” would understand this and feel compassion and bring an interesting perspective to the table. You would be wrong. After showing a viral video about the 60 most “ghetto names,” Raven said:
“Just to bring it back, can we take back ‘racist’ and say ‘discriminatory,’ because I think that’s a better word. And I’m very discriminatory against words like the ones they were saying in those names. I’m not about to hire you if your name is Watermelondrea. It’s just not going to happen. I’m not going to hire you.”
“I’m not about to hire you if your name is Watermelondrea,” said RAVEN SYMONE. That kind of cognitive dissonance is astonishing.
Just for a bit of perspective, my real name (my real name is not Kaiser) is very Indian. Like, my name is profoundly Indian. There was a man who had a very similar name to mine and he unified the Indian subcontinent around 300 BC. I’ve never been told that my name is too ethnic/weird to be hired for a job, but that’s not the thing people actual say out loud, you know? Whenever I go anywhere new and I have to sigh and spell out my name very slowly for all of the new people, I can feel the judgment. I can feel the “why didn’t her parents just name her Jennifer?” vibe. So this would be like me encountering a Vijay Singh and saying, “Nope, I can’t even start with THAT NAME.”
Photos courtesy of WENN.
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