Whoopi Goldberg shared her views about Pepsi’s Kendall Jenner commercial on The View Thursday afternoon, saying she doesn’t understand why people are calling the commercial “cultural appropriation” in their critiques of it.
“I think they thought they were deeper than they were,” Goldberg said. “If you’re 19 or 21, you think it’s a great thing because you’re doing something,” Goldberg said in defense of Jenner.
View co-host Sunny Hostin argued that Jenner and the Kardashian family have a history of cultural appropriation and that she should have known better.
“When you have been in this business for 10 years and in 2015 she already got reprimanded because she wore cornrows, she already had a taste of controversy. I think she should have known better,” Hostin said.
And that’s when Goldberg brought up the idea that wearing a weave was cultural appropriation.
“It’s just a crappy idea; it didn’t work. This cultural-appropriation stuff is really starting to make me crazy. If we’re gonna go with cultural appropriation, wear natural hair. If we’re wearing white-lady hair, isn’t that appropriation as well?” Goldberg said, adding, “Listen, now, there are some things where you can say, ‘Hey, you need to be more sensitive,’ but this ain’t one of them. This is a bad commercial that didn’t work.”
I’m sorry, but no one is wearing the finest of white lady’s hair as weave. Straight hair is not synonymous with being white. And no one ever goes to the beauty-supply store asking for some “1B (color) Italian Lady Hair.”
People still fail to realize that black women are blackballed even when choosing to wear their hair natural, and let’s just forget about the natural-hair movement that has been around for decades.
Furthermore, the Jenner-Kardashian clan wear more weave than a little bit. So please, let’s stop this nonsense about weaves being synonymous with trying to be “white.” If that’s the case, are the Jenner-Kardashians trying to be “whiter”?