Social media has reacted angrily at two journalists, who publicly mocked the looks of Blue Ivy Carter, the seven-year-old daughter of Beyonce and Jay Z.
The journalists from Harper’s Magazine and Vanity Fair responded to a social media post after rapper Megan Thee Stallion posted two black-and-white photos of herself with Blue Ivy and Beyoncé on her Instagram and Twitter accounts.
The Vanity Fair film critic K. Austin Collins responded in a deleted tweet, saying: “I have a feeling the jay z face genes are about to really hit Blue Ivy and I feel so sorry for her.” In response, Violet Lucca, a web editor for Harper’s, replied to Collins’ tweet: “They haven’t already?”
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“Or she’ll just get plastic surgery at 16 a la Kylie Jenner and we’ll all have to pretend that she always looked that way…I can’t allow myself to feel too sorry for the incredibly rich!” Lucca added.
Since y’all wanna be bold and anti-Black on this app, especially when it comes to Blue Ivy: pic.twitter.com/8os61E12V8
— Clarkisha Kent (@IWriteAllDay_) January 1, 2020
Their comments caused a stir on social media with a host of people tagging them as racist. Many came to the defense of Blue Ivy, including author and activist Mikki Kendall, who in a Twitter thread, described the comments as going too “far”.
“There’s nothing harmless about insulting a child’s features regardless of whether that child has famous parents or not,” Kendall wrote. “There’s no value in colorism, anti-blackness or attempting to pretend that class is a justification for targeting a 7-year-old with insults.”
This isn’t the first time the Carters have gone through such ordeal on social media. In 2014, a producer of BET’s 106 & Park was suspended for a comment she made about the then-2-year-old.
Delivering lines about Blue Ivy’s hypothetical thoughts during the MTV Video Music Awards, guest host Karrueche Tran said: “I really did wake up like this, because my parents never comb my hair.” BET president Stephen Hill later apologized for the joke and explained that Tran was simply reading lines.
“I’m sorry about the Blue Ivy tweet — bad joke, and black girls, in particular, deserve better,” Collins tweeted Wednesday. And after a Twitter user told him that “some tweets should be left in drafts,” Collins responded: “you’re right. Poor form on my end. Thanks all for calling it out.”
Lucca responded in a series of tweets Wednesday and Thursday.
“Sorry I was cleaning my apartment while this blew up…children of famous ought to be off-limits, but time and again they haven’t been. So I said something petty and have been called ugly, old, and a racist,” she wrote in a tweet Wednesday night.
