Source: Rick Davis / SplashNews.com / Splash News
For as long as TV personality Evelyn Lozada has been in the public eye, she has proudly proclaimed that she’s Puerto Rican. For the first time though, she’s made it clear that she’s Afro-Puerto Rican, in case you were wondering.
While visiting with Justin Sylvester on his E! News show Just the Sip, she discussed it.
Justin told her during their interview that she was an inspiration for women in general, but specifically Latinas because of the lack of representation there was for so long on television prior to her debut on Basketball Wives. That’s when the 43-year-old identified herself as Afro-Latina publicly.
“I consider myself Afro-Latina. I have backtracked my roots so I know where I come from,” she said. “I know I have a little bit of everything.”
She didn’t specify the roots, but opened up about having a Basketball Wives co-star tell her she was trying to be Black, which really bothered her.
“It’s funny because on this season, somebody was like, ‘B—h you think you Black!’ I’ve never had anybody tell me that. I was so offended because I didn’t know what that meant. I’m like, ‘I think I’m Black? I grew up in New York!’ I know where I come from. I’ve done DNA tests just to know. But I want to be able to tap into that more,” she said. “I’m proud to be Puerto Rican and from New York and Afro-Latina and all that good stuff.”
While Evelyn’s daughter, Shaniece Hairston, has identified as a Black Latina, Evelyn in the past just said she was Latina and/or Boriqua. She may simply not have had the chance to do any Ancestry-inspired tests to know her roots at the time and since the topic was brought up on JTP, thought it to be a good time to set the record straight.
However, this revelation also comes at a time when Evelyn has been criticized by Basketball Wives viewers for her use of the N-word on the show and disparaging comments about the looks of her darker, undeniably Black co-star OG Chijindu. Because she hadn’t publicly identified herself as being Afro-Latina before, people weren’t pleased:
Now that we know she is Afro-Latina doesn’t mean that she or anyone else has free reign to denigrate another Black women over her looks. Hopefully, in her hopes of tapping into the Latina and Afro-Latina market more to make her mark, she will go about things differently and keep the N-words, monkey emojis and “ugly” comments to a minimum — at least on TV for goodness sake.
Evelyn’s comments start at the 2:38 mark below:
