Oh, Raven-Symone, we need you to stop talking already. In response to Univision host Rodner Figueroa who was fired last week for saying that Michelle Obama “looks like she’s from the cast of Planet of the Apes,” Symone said she didn’t think it was a problem because he said he voted for Obama and that “some people look like animals.” This is not the first problematic statement the actress has made about race either.
Maybe she should just stick to reading other people’s words.
Team Blackness also discussed the problems with Starbuck’s new #RaceTogether campaign and Common just wanting everyone to get along.
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geg6
Anybody catch Chris Hayes’ show last night?
Nancy Giles got completely schooled by Jay Smooth. It was sad to see. Maybe she and Raven can soothe their hurt feefees together over a triple chai latte or something.
raven
say what?
Villago Delenda Est
@raven: Another Raven, raven.
Tree With Water
“Maybe she should just stick to reading other people’s words”.
That’s how I feel about Jon Voight. A wonderful actor, who appeared in many of the finest films released during my lifetime. I’m a big fan of his work. But as I’ve said before, the guy makes John Wayne look like a philosopher king.
piratedan
@raven: with all apologies…. you’re so vain, you probably think this thread is about you, don’t you? don’t you?….
Ayn Randy
This is a great way of endearing yourself to the right-wing. White Republicans love when black people start lecturing other black people about their funny pants or being offended when someone says something that isn’t “politically correct.” Symone must see an opportunity to make some cash in the right-wing grifting machine. It IS highly lucrative.
Betty Cracker
@geg6: She assumed he was white, and he corrected her. Awk. Ward.
rikyrah
Raven needs to just shut up.
rikyrah
@geg6:
Saw the clip…hilarious..
Oh Nancy…he was light, bright…..but, not White..
LOL
SatanicPanic
Can we get Don Lemon to weigh in?
Couldn't Stand the Weather
I can’t deal with this shit.
Between this woman, Don Lemon, Armstrong Williams, Clarence Thomas and Herman Cain, I need to turn the PC and the TV off, and just read some Richard Wright.
Or something.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Betty Cracker: Perfect! Jay Smooth is wonderful.
Germy Shoemangler
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): I was confused by the clip because I was expecting J.B. Smoove.
I can’t keep my celebrities straight.
Hal
Maybe it’s being bi-racial myself, but I thought it was obvious Jay wasn’t a white guy.
With Raven, I just can’t figure her out. Her whole “Don’t call me African American, I’m just American” shtick, to her defending Figueroa, she seems to be mind melded to Stacy Dash. Oh well. Oprah tried to save her.
Germy Shoemangler
@Tree With Water: When did we start turning to entertainers for wisdom? Did it start with Dylan? Deep probing questions about politics, religion, race relations, philosophy. Even Dylan started getting embarrassed by it. “I’m just a song and dance man,” he told them.
Raven is a talented young lady. She can take a script and recite the lines convincingly and with charm and feeling. She has a right to express her political and sociological opinions, but I don’t need to take them seriously or look to her for inspiration.
A man, through years of practice, becomes proficient on the guitar. Then he is confronted by interviews who want to know his opinions on Life And Death.
I remember one comedic actor (I can’t remember his name but you’d all recognize him). He played the tic in a short-lived series. He was in a sitcom with David Spade. He was on one of the morning shows, there to plug the sitcom. He faced a barrage of REALLY DEEP QUESTIONS about what he sitcom was trying to say about human relations, and romantic relationships, and if he had any input in the serious issues being examined. He got more and more uncomfortable, and finally admitted it was just a comedy, and that he left the scripts to the writers. His job was to make the audience laugh by saying the lines.
Most entertainers won’t admit that. They seem flattered by the deep questions, and reach deep into themselves to express… not much of anything important.
Betty Cracker
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): He was really classy about it. I sorta felt sorry for Giles because I can almost see how someone could make that mistake (I’ve always assumed JS is biracial). But damn.
Cpl Cam
@Germy Shoemangler: Patrick Warburton.
Germy Shoemangler
@Cpl Cam: And I admire Warburton for being honest and self-aware enough not to take the bait of these IMPORTANT questions. He didn’t take himself so seriously.
I remember one interview with John Lennon. A wide-ranging discussion. Lennon suddenly admitted that he didn’t believe in evolution. “Why aren’t monkeys turning into men nowadays?” Lennon was my favorite songwriter and singer and wit, but it was clear he didn’t take education or science seriously. He didn’t like school, or his professors, and he found his calling in rock ‘n roll.
I would have preferred to hear him talk about his songwriting process, or favorite 1950s influences. I didn’t need for him to be my dalai lama.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Betty Cracker: I almost felt sorry for her too, because it was so honestly inadvertent, and I sorta get how it could happen. Jay is always so incredibly classy, and it never occurred to me that he wasn’t biracial, and identified as black. He’s hot, also too.
Germy Shoemangler
Speaking of evolution, didn’t Neil DeGrasse Tyson make the point about the human body being a poor example of intelligent design? The windpipe is mixed up with food ingestion (many people choke each year) and the “entertainment complex” (down below) is right next to a sewage system. What intelligent designer would come up with that?
Okay, now I’m way off topic.
A Ghost To Most
@Germy Shoemangler:
I did, and do. ‘Imagine’ says more to me than anything any preacher ever said, or anything written in a moldy goatherders manual.
Tree With Water
@Germy Shoemangler: With me I guess it boils down to the fact that I assumed for years that anyone as talented as Voight- and of that generation- would necessarily be intelligent enough to see things more or less my way, politically speaking. The man disabused me of my dumbness, and did so with both dramatic and comedic flair. Which figures…
Germy Shoemangler
@A Ghost To Most: I agree about Imagine. John was not a tin pan alley tunesmith. His songs mean a great deal to me.
But the interviews, with the interviewers trying to outdo each other with how deep they can go, trying to find symbolism in everything he sang, said or did, eventually irritated him, just like they irritated Dylan.
Mike J
@geg6:
The funniest part to me was that I knew who Jay Smooth is and had to google Nancy Giles.
Germy Shoemangler
@Tree With Water: You weren’t being dumb. You did what we all do, confuse the actors with their roles. And so people think Humphrey Bogart was a tough guy, rather than a Broadway entertainer, and they think Voight was the sensitive veteran from Coming Home, rather than an ambitious, careerist actor, and they think Stan Laurel was a simple-minded soul, rather than a shrewd businessman and director.
geg6
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
I didn’t feel sorry for her or even start to. She acted all “I’m gonna scold this white boy”, never for a moment examining her own assumptions. It was no better than when a white person assumes some black person is an ignorant banger and goes on to lecture him/her about all the things wrong with black people without ever once thinking, gee…maybe this person has a PhD or has a bi-racial family and he/she isn’t the stereotype I have in my head.
Another Holocene Human
@Mike J: Me too. She recovered well but it’s obvious that this media personality doesn’t watch youtube, which, wow. Generation gap.
Another Holocene Human
What does it mean when we say we think someone is biracial? Identifying as biracial is a personal choice. We’re coming off of a couple centuries where being biracial wasn’t an option.
brantl
I think Raven Symone looks like kind of a chipmunk, to me.
Tree With Water
@Germy Shoemangler: Indeed. I can hear my late father even now responding to a fan of the Gipper’s style by saying, in a voice dripping with contempt, “He’s a goddamn actor” (accent on ‘actor’). As if the guy was unaware of that fact, or was an idiot if he did know. So essentially he called the guy an idiot. I remember it largely because my father rarely if ever took that particular tone with anyone outside the immediate family.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@geg6: Hence my “almost.” Frankly it pissed me off a good deal, because as you note, she never examined her own assumptions. J Smooth was amazingly gracious about it, and tied it elegantly back into the topic.
I am amused, in a way she no doubt would not be, that I know who Jay Smooth is and had to google Nancy Giles. Just like Mike J did.
geg6
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
Well, the one good thing about this whole kerfluffle is that although I’m old enough to know who Nancy Giles is, I’m hip enough to know who Jay Smooth is. ;-)
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@geg6: That is good. I’m old enough but not something enough to know who Nancy Giles is.
kc
That’s way down on the list of things that I myself need. It’s just as easy to stop listening to her, whoever she is.
Karen
1. She might have been influenced by her TV dad/mentor Cosby.
2. I’m sure if someone had said that she was a pervert and/or that she had no right to marry her girlfriend she would have sung a different tune.
nobees
@brantl: I think she’s doing that thing where she’s trying to look younger than she is (possibly because she hasn’t aged particularly well), and it’s having a kind of uncanny valley affect.