Teen Mom fans are all too aware that Mackenzie McKee has made mistakes on social media and in real life.
Heck, that’s all good. Viewers and followers alike expect a certain amount of mess from this franchise.
It’s arguably required.
But there are places where even ardent supporters will draw the line, and one of those is racism.
What Mackenzie had to say about Vice President Kamala Harris this week is enough to turn people’s stomachs.
Before we get into Mackenzie’s awful, inexcusable statement, we want to clarify that this is not old news.
Fans aren’t dredging up Mackenzie’s comments from her teen years, or ancient tweets from which she might have learned.
These comments that the longtime reality star made on social media are from right here in January 2021.
She is a 26-year-old grown woman.
In the midst of a conversation online, McKee made it quite clear that she doesn’t consider our Vice President to be a role model.
Fair enough, but …
“Sorry, no,” Mackenzie commented cattily, using a stop sign, a hand, and a mocking laughter emoji.
“There are a lot of amazing women in the world for my daughters to look up to and see as role models,” she acknowledged.
“Kamala Harris is not one of them,” Mackenzie then wrote.
Not great, but the explicit racism is yet to come.
“It blows my mind that out of all the amazing colored women in this world, that is the one who is making history,” Mackenzie scoffed.
Um, yeah. That was a thing that was said.
Excuse us????
It is absolutely inappropriate and downright racist to refer to anyone as a “colored” person, and everyone born after 1930 knows it.
In case this for some reason needs explaining, there were many decades when people of color read the word “colored” to show them where they could (and could not) go.
People of all political persuasions should be able to agree on the simple fact that you should not call people by the words used to oppress them.
The history of that kind of insult is horrific and sadly still recent.
Segregation is part of living memory for millions. Is it the N-word she said? No. But a label doesn’t have to be the literal worst slur in the history of language to be offensive, wrong, and downright disgusting.
It’s almost funny, because there are people on the political left with fair, nuanced criticisms of Kamala Harris who might question if she’s a role model.
From her record as a prosecutor to her promotion of FOSTA/SESTA, some feel that there are more admirable women of color in and out of politics to admire.
But fans quickly observed that this nuanced take is clearly not what Mackenzie was expressing.
“The caucasity of this bitch!” one commenter angrily declared.
“It was in her liked tweets all along and now I feel less cray for making that post,” a Redditor noted, referring to Mackenzie’s toxic, bigoted side.
“Nasty little ingrown toenail of a human smh.”
Others simply called for her firing by MTV. There is no excuse for that in 2021, if there ever was.
Some observers recalled that this is hardly Mackenzie’s first brush with racism.
She has previously referred to Native Americans as being both “lazy” and “welfare-dependant.”
That is categorically racist. It is also vicious and untrue.
As is often the case when Mackenzie is in the spotlight, fans astutely brought up her dubious history with pets.
From the pomeranian that died in her “care” to breeding an elderly dog to leaving another dog “caged” while she was out of the country.
Mackenzie is a real piece of work, and while animal abuse should never distract from racism, both are important topics very relevant to Mackenzie.
It is appalling that Mackenzie would not only harbor such bigotry to refer to a woman like Kamala as “colored.”
It is arguably just as bad that she felt comfortable expressing that on social media.
We must strive to make a society in which people find it unthinkable to express racist opinions or use derogatory terms for people of color.
Contrary to popular belief, racism is rarely about lack of information, so it cannot simply be educated out of existence.
Instead, it must be shamed into oblivion. Some might dismiss it as “cancel culture” but these kinds of words do matter.
MTV can help by firing Mackenzie.
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