Source: Shahar Azran / Getty
If you’ve been keeping up, you know that Amanda Seales has been speaking out since Emmys weekend when she was escorted out of an after-party meant to celebrate Black Hollywood. While she initially, in Instagram Stories from that very night and event, said a white woman named Kiara had made sure she was kicked out, during the “Side Effects of Professionalism Part 1” episode of her Small Doses podcast last week, she changed her tune. The 38-year-old comedian and actress placed blame, publicly, on Vanessa Anderson, a fellow Black woman, who does PR for Issa Rae and puts together the party every year. Amanda mentioned that the two have never really hit it off, but implied that the fact that Vanessa would go so far as to have her removed from the space felt incredibly unfair and uncalled for.
“This party was not at her house. This was not a personal event. This was not a birthday party…It was not a naming ceremony. This was a Hollywood party for Black entertainers and contributors to Hollywood,” she said. “So by nature of that, I am a part of that industry and should be here celebrating with my community.”
“It’s very frustrating to be somebody who’s just trying to do good work and have to deal with this type of unprofessionalism,” she added. “To have to deal with this type of informality and to deal with this literal type of petty a– f–kery, and Hollywood is so rife with this.”
However, Amanda’s co-star, Sarunas Jackson, decided to speak on the situation, saying in a since deleted tweet responding to our story that if Amanda is going to be disrespectful, she can’t expect people to welcome her to things. That’s us putting it mildly, to be honest.
“You can’t be a disrespectful-a– human being and expect people to want to hang out with you,” he said. “It’s quite simple. Sit it out.”
People ended up using his comment, and the fact that she was removed from the party without any intervention from fellow Black Hollywood folks, to try and justify a belief that Amanda is the problem in any and every situation. Amanda, who is highly opinionated on most matters concerning Black people, dating, politics, etc., couldn’t catch a break on Black Twitter:
https://twitter.com/LLQJ206/status/1180592353427349506
Well, Amanda saw all of that social media commentary and decided to respond. She posted this over the weekend:
In addition, early Monday morning she took to her IG stories to share her unfiltered thoughts on everyone taking joy out of her being embarrassed at the party and by her Insecure co-star.
I guess what fascinates me is the excitement of people to be like, ‘She must be a b—h! She’s got to be a b—h! If everyone’s saying she’s a b—h then she must be a b—h!’ I think that’s fascinating to me because, because I don’t know what value that has in their lives. I think that’s what trips me out about it.
I’m not f–kin’ with Trump, I’m not degrading Black folks, I’m not out here being a Fox News commentator. People legit don’t like me, one, there’s a lot of people who don’t like me because I just really don’t care about their fake phony sh-t and I don’t keep up appearances to make them feel like their fake phony sh-t is not noticed. Two, on an Internet scale, people just don’t like me because a lot of the time they’re misinterpreting sh-t that I say. And then three, people don’t like me because of their own sh-t. Four, there’s a bonus, some people don’t like me because of an interaction we had. I could have had a bad day, I could have just been stank that day, or, more often than not, they did some f–ksh-t and I called them out on it. Nonetheless, it is fascinating to watch people so enthusiastic about your downfall when you have dedicated your whole life to the upliftment of them. Truly, it is like a paradoxical thing to witness. I’m a sensitive person, but more importantly, I’m an intellectual, so at this point I’m just looking at it like, ‘Well, she must be a b—h! All these people can’t be wrong.’ Okay, so then what? [laughs] So then what? So now we have established that Amanda Seales is a b—h. Now what?
See the thing is, I know who I am and I know I’m not a b—h. A b—h is somebody who’s mean for no f–kin’ reason. If I’m stank, nine times out of 10, there’s a reason. You may not be the reason. The reason might be my mood, the reason might be some sh-t I’m going through, the reason might be the person, but there’s always a reason. There’s always something behind my ire. Nonetheless, when people are saying things like, ‘If everybody’s saying she’s like this then that must be what it is and she need to change,’ I think you reach a certain point in your life where you’re like — first of all, everybody don’t think I’m a b—h. I’m a quality over quantity person. I think we can all agree that there’s way more trash a– people in this world than there are quality people. The quality people be f–kin’ with me. They do. They be f–kin’ with me heavy. And a lot of the times, I have experienced my whole life, people who have created these opinions and they come back later. But really, the whole point in talking about this is…sometimes you have to take yourself outside of things and you just look at it from the outside and your’e like, wow, this is what people spent their day doing: discussing my existence. And I don’t know if that has any bearing on their support of my work or not but it was just something that was interesting to them. That is fascinating to me in a very real way. Fascinating.
But for the record, I am not a b—h. Unless you b—h made. Bu-duh-bump.
To paraphrase, she says she’s not a b–h, and the fact that people have found so much joy in other people claiming she is is interesting.
If you’d like to see more of the comments people made on Twitter, aside from Sarunas’, that caused the comedian to clap back, hit the flip.
