Kitt Shapiro, Eartha Kitt. Source: Ron Galella / Getty
Eartha Kitt’s only daughter, Kitt Shapiro, has been dealing with trolls on and off the internet for most of her life. Since Shapiro is more fair-skinned than Kitt (her father is white) and has blonde hair, many people don’t believe she is Kitt’s biological daughter. After Kitt died in 2008, the harassment on social media hit an all-time high for Shapiro.
During an appearance on The Tamron Hall Show, she said people came to her on social media in disbelief that she was Eartha Kitt’s daughter.
Well it wasn’t really until social media became a thing. So, it’s after my mother passed. I had somebody on, it must have been on Facebook, or it was a response to a blog. I have a blog and it was in response to ‘you can’t possibly be her biological child. She obviously lied to you her entire life. And you were clearly adopted.’ To which my response was, ‘when do you think a Black woman could have adopted a white baby?’ First of all, I don’t care how famous she was. Tamron jumps in, “They weren’t exactly doing that back then” to which Shapiro responded, “Not in 1961, certainly not, and second of all, my father was this little white pasty, you know Irish, German-Irish as you can get.
Kitt Shapiro, 60, said she’s also been criticized for not being “Black enough.” She said her mother, who was also Black and white, was relieved that she wouldn’t face the discrimination she did because she couldn’t be easily identified.
It’s amazing! I mean people hide behind, as we all know, we’ve all been victims of some type of trolling or nastiness online and people, they just assume that because you don’t, as I mentioned in the TikTok, look the way they think you should look, then you can’t possibly be who you say you are. Now, my mother only had one child, and this is what she got. And she actually loved the fact that I was this, this mutt. She would say to me, ’you either break every rule or you fill every quota.’ She said, ’You are a walking United Nation.’ And I truly think that, you know, she was proud. She was proud to be the parent of somebody that couldn’t be easily identified, because she herself had been so stereotyped and so pigeon holed because of her skin color obviously. I am not to the other extreme sometimes, you know, criticized because I’m not Black enough and I can’t help the way that I was born.
In 2021, Shapiro wrote a memoir about her and her mother’s loving relationship, Eartha & Kitt: A Daughter’s Love Story in Black and White.
Watch Shapiro’s interview below:
