In the latest update about Raven-Symoné, an online petition is calling for her removal from The View after she intimated last week that a high school student in Columbia, S.C., could have avoided being violently attacked by a school resource officer if she had simply gotten off her phone.
“You are in school, get off yo’ phone. What you doin’ on Instagram?” she quipped during a conversation on the show about the incident at Spring Valley High School. During a different episode of the show, she denigrated African-American names, saying that she wouldn’t hire anyone with “a ghetto name.”
The petition at Change.org, which so far has garnered 125,280 signatures, calls on Barbara Walters to remove the actress-turned-talk show host, saying that she “has been spouting her ignorant and self-hating spiel on [The V]iew for long enough.”
“African Americans and black people around the Diaspora need a voice representative of their views and not a voice representative of what white people want us to say,” writes the petitioner, Che Scott-Heron, of London. “We need strong black role [models] in prominent positions on television an[d] Raven Symoné cannot provide that. That is why I ask that we petition to remove her from The View.”
Scott-Heron updated the petition Friday to respond to critics who said it’s unlikely that the petition would get Raven-Symoné fired and that she should focus on combating police brutality and violence.
“[O]f course police brutality is a much bigger issue than Raven Symoné but we are fighting BOTH,” she wrote. “The narrative of Raven Symoné contributes to peoples [sic] opinions of black people and then contributes to police brutality[.] [I]t is all interlinked.”