“Teen Mom” fans are bringing past racially insensitive comments made by Kailyn Lowry to light amid the social awakening going on across the country right now. In 2014, Lowry accused her ex Jo Rivera of dressing their son “like a thug.”
The confrontation was caught on camera and aired on the show. After it started making the social media rounds again this week, Lowry deactivated her Twitter account.
“When he goes over there, you have him dress a certain way; you have him look a certain way; you have his hair cut a certain way, and that’s not who he is,” she says to Rivera in the clip. “I think you forget about the fact that he’s half-white and he’s half-Hispanic. I feel like you dress him in a stereotypical way and I don’t like it.”
Rivera responds by saying, “I don’t understand what your description of how I dress him is.”
“You dress him like a thug!” Lowry snaps back at him.
Kailyn Lowry from Teen Mom 2 is a racist and an abuser and should be fired. Here she is calling her own son a thug Because Jo didn't give him a white boy haircut. @MTV @TeenMom When are you going to fire her??? pic.twitter.com/h0ETLnmVH8
— La Diablita 😈🎩 YHLQMDLG (@Bebecitaaa69) June 10, 2020
At the time it aired, Lowry brushed off the reactions to it by tweeting, “Bahahahahahaha ok, I’m not racist. Gotta make good TV somehow!”
Her fried Toni Ziegler said that the comments were made just to get under Rivera’s skin.
“She was wrong to say it, for sure, but she was upset that Jo tries to change Isaac’s life and look so much whenever he goes over there. Plus, a lot of the time Jo just does it because he knows it makes Kail mad. He likes to push her buttons,” Ziegler said.
A petition has been started to urge people not to support “Teen Mom” as long as Lowry is still a part of the show. It accuses Lowry of not using her platform to uplift people of color, but instead uses it to “bully and embarrass” them.
She’s not the only “Teen Mom” in hot water for racist comments. MTV announced earlier this week it was cutting ties with Taylor Selfridge after tweets she made in 2012 resurfaced in which she said black people scare her.
The new outrage over the comments comes as people nationwide are joining the Black Lives Matter movement to end systemic racism and police brutality.
It started over two weeks ago when George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police officers in the street. Hundreds of thousands of protestors have been marching ever since in every state across the country, and in some major cities worldwide, as well.
