Tiffany Haddish is one of those celebrities who seems to enjoy letting the world in on every aspect of her life. But maybe we don’t need to know everything she’s thinking all the time. The “Girls Trip” star once again found herself in trouble on social media when she posted a TikTok video of her visit to a Zimbabwean grocery store.
As she walked around the store describing the various products she found, it seemed like the store was similar to any Walmart, Target or Costco type of store you would find in America.
“Look at the grocery store,” she said. “It’s beautiful.…It’s huge. It’s absolutely humongous. In Africa, baby...believe it…I just like demystifying shit.”
While that may sound like a totally innocuous post, it was her shock at the store’s size, the many products available and the familiarity of it all that had people finding her reaction more than a bit insulting.
One person wrote in the comments, “What were you expecting?” Others seemed to understand what she was trying to do, with another user replying, “she isn’t looking down on Africa [just] demystifying what other people say about Africa.”
As more criticism rolled in, Haddish defended her post, writing in a since deleted tweet, “I am an American a Black one at that and Told for years that people are starving in Africa, showed pictures of babies with flies on them. Told crazy stories of how they kill each other and there is war everyday there.”
She added that her Black friends were initially “scared” to take the trip with her, but since they arrived they’ve “been eyes full of tears finding out the truth.” She shared the video because she was “demystifying some bullshit that we have been told and showed in America.”
Haddish may have had the best of intentions in posting this video, but her over-the-top persona seems to rub some people the wrong way, which means they’ll never hear the message because they’re too focused on the messenger.