Well, this one’s certainly a mess. Kelly Osbourne thought she was being super helpful in shutting down Donald Trump‘s overt racism against the Latino community (and basically any non-white people, although this is about Latinos in particular) while appearing on The View on Tuesday. Only she rather spectacularly missed the point and showed her own racism in doing so, claiming that we shouldn’t be all anti-immigration. After all, if it weren’t for the Latino community, who would scrub our toilets?
Here’s her verbatim quote, just so you understand that I’m not making this shit up:
“If you kick every Latino out of this country, then who is going to be cleaning your toilets, Donald Trump?”
To be fair, I get what she was TRYING to say here – she’s mentioning the fact that many immigrants are forced to take low-paying service jobs, which is a big issue but with way deeper intricacies than just “Latinos clean rich people’s toilets”. Kelly was misguided, but she seems to be trying to take this whole thing as a learning experience, and she posted an apology to her Facebook page on Tuesday afternoon:
I want to start by saying I ALWAYS take responsibility for my actions. In this particular case I will take responsibility for my poor choice of words but I will not apologize for being a racist as I am NOT. I whole-hearted fucked up today. I don’t want to bullshit anyone with lame excuses. Although, I was stopped mid-sentence by Rosie and couldn’t finish my point I will not let Rosie take responsibility for my words. I should have known better as I was on The View and it was live. I’ve learned a very valuable lesson. It is my hope that this situation will open up a conversation about immigration and the Latin community as a whole. By the way I clean my own fucking toilets.
What I think Kelly fails to realize is that racism is sometimes not overt. You don’t have to be a Confederate flag flying Nazi to have inherent racism, or at the very least to subscribe to stereotypes you’ve never realized were potentially offensive/discriminatory. Awareness is the first step to getting rid of that ignorance, and I’m not on some soapbox, here – I’ve got plenty to learn. As long as Kelly really does learn from this and use it as an opportunity for reflection/bettering herself, fair enough.
Well she is correct, that is why those in office are letting so many overflow our nation with service workers so the rich can hire cheap labor whom won’t complain a lot.. don’t have greater aspirations to go up the corporate ladder of their work place..