According to E!Online, Charlize Theron did not try to get Tia Mowry banned from their fitness class.
More specifically, the site reports:
“Charlize Theron may have played an evil queen, but she isn’t going around lording it over people at SoulCycle. In response to a report that Theron wants Tia Mowry banned from the celeb-favored spinning franchise in the wake of an alleged exchange-gone-wrong between the two of them, a source assures E! News that “this is totally fabricated and completely not true.”
Phewsh, well that is a sigh of relief! I thought for a second we might have to get Iyanla Vanzant to shake a calabash full of cowry shells around those two or something. Of course, there is still the matter of the original incident, where Mowry alleges Theron rudely cut down her introduction with an “Oh My God!” But honestly, who cares? Amirite?
Seriously, who really cares that Theron didn’t speak to Mowry at SoulCycle? For one, what the hell is SoulCycle? I don’t know, I do Zumba. And secondly, is there some sort of law, which requires us to speak to the Mowry sisters all the time? Because if so, I want that law struck down and the Congressman, who introduced it, impeached and tried for treason.
What I’m saying is that there could be hundreds of reasons why she didn’t speak to Mowry. Theron could be an introvert, who doesn’t particularly like strange and unfamiliar women interrupting her SoulCycle class for her. Or she could not have recognized the one-half of the stars from “Sister, Sister.” Or she simply could be she is just not a fan of the goodie-two shoe twin spawns of Claire Huxtable’s respectability and just really wanted her to go away. That is a huge possibility and I wouldn’t be mad at Theron in the least if that is the case. Or Theron could just be a big, fat (physically skinny) racist. That could be a possibility right?
No. Well, why not? Eye roll. Oh yeah, the African thing…
What most annoys me about this story is reading comment thread after comment thread of Black folks in particular, denouncing even the possibility that racial bias played a part in Theron’s rude behavior simply because Theron grew up in South Africa. Now, I’m not saying that Theron is racist or even her exchange with Mowry was racial. I’m saying that we shouldn’t instantly exclude the possibility of racism – or even give her a pass – simply because she might know some Black people in Africa.
Yes, this is totally petty. But it is pettiness spawned out of years of hearing Black folks make ridiculous claims about Theron’s relationship to blackness. The belief, as it has been told to me since this White woman stepped on the scene confusing everybody, is that Theron, who was born and reared on a small farm in Benoni, Transvaal Province, South Africa, is more African than most African Americans because she was born in South Africa around native Africans, so by default, she’s African too – or more specifically, an Afrikaan. Sounds confusing. Yeah, well you know how I feel every time some one says this to me.
And yet Black folks specifically repeat this sophistry proudly and with a straight face. And also without the least bit of irony. You know the kind that might make one think about colonialism and imperialism. At the very least, the apartheid system in South Africa, which by design, was created to keep native African culture separate and subjugated under whiteness including the Afrikaners
And especially the Afrikaners.
For those, who don’t know, the Afrikaan language and culture is a derivative of the language and culture of early Dutch European “settlers” (‘cuz folks were already inhabiting those lands they “settled” into), who arrived along the coast of modern day South Africa in the mid 1600s. You can read this Wiki page for the full history of the Afrikaners (and definitely check out the annotations at the bottom of the page in case you need more insight).
But just to highlight some points: despite being in a land of Black people, the Dutch “settlers” were kind of separatist (some owned Black slaves) and made sure to keep themselves insular from the natives, hence the “founding” of two provinces called Orange Free State and Transvaal, which later became the birthplace of everybody’s favorite African American, Charlize Theron. As well as the creation of their own language, Boer-culture and even religion, known today as Afrikaan. And by 1948 this “culture” and its Afrikaan Nationalist Party would gain control of the South African government and begin restricting Africans (the Black kind) from having access to housing, education, employment, citizenship (got-damn citizenship on their own land) and even voting rights in the government.
Now the point of this rushed history lesson is to get folks thinking of the ridiculousness of calling an “ethnic” group, which intentionally existed separately from actual Africans, African. An “ethnic” group, which still has largely white-only enclaves in apartheid South Africa. An “ethnic” group, which contains a loud and vocal subgroup of “ethnic” Whites called the Boers, who even to this day feel that they are entitled to homeland in South Africa because God supposedly told them that. And a group, who also to this very day, is identified South African National Census – not as Black or coloured or Asian – but as White.
Because even in Africa, a white person is to be still treat and regarded as a white person. And yes, there is also a Wiki page for that.
So yeah, Theron might be an Afrikaner from South Africa but she is no African. Now does her Afrikaan heritage make her a racist? In all truthfulness, one can make a very good case that the whole culture was formed out of White supremacy, so therefore, yeah! Not to mention her tone-deaf response to Viola Davis’ comments about the lack of roles for Black women in Hollywood. At the very least, she is pretty aloof.
With that said, she also adopted a Black baby boy, so that means something right? But now that I think more about it, so did Madonna. And Strom Thurmond had a Black kid too. His was even biological. Point is, using a non-Black person’s affinity for Black folks, including their abilities to not be racist, based on arbitrary reasons like who they might live by, date or even call family is a huge mistake. One made with foggy blinders on, which probably got cloudy during SoulCycle class.
