2019’s MVP Megan Thee Stallion celebrated New Year’s Eve with Beyonce and her crew, including Beyonce’s 7-year-old daughter Blue Ivy. The photobooth photos are super cute, but a couple of journalists decided to make some messy tweets making fun of a literal child’s appearance.
Vanity Fair’s K. Austin Collins wrote and has since deleted:
“I have a feeling the jay z face genes are about to really hit Blue Ivy and I feel so sorry for her.”
Harper’s editor Violet Lucca also piled on (and also deleted) in a reply:
“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!”
Anyone who has ever been online should have known that the Bey hive wouldn’t allow this shady, racist slander to stand, so Twitter had MANY opinions about this particular discourse.
“They are not slandering Blue Ivy because she is “rich”, they are slandering her because she is VISIBLY Black. Because all last week it was tweet after tweet about how beautiful and happy biracial Saint and North West looked. F*ck all y’all.”
“Another example of that “hating on Black girls and women as social currency” shit. The Blue Ivy insults are gonna go down in history with the old Serena tweets. Keep it.”
“Film critic at VF insulting Blue Ivy’s looks. Nothing surprises me. No wonder so many ppl hate critics and think they only exist to deprive folks’ joy. It is a bad stereotype and some good critics who aren’t misogynoiristic/antiblack exist, but still so many assholes too. Many.?”
In case anyone is confused about why people are upset @melvillmatic insults Blue Ivy (a child!) & then @unbuttonmyeyes replies with a crack about plastic surgery. Now he works for @VanityFair & she works @Harpers in case you ever wondered about media influence & misogynoir pic.twitter.com/RqwTPWVvpX
— Mikki Kendall (@Karnythia) January 1, 2020
Collins, to his credit, tweeted what seems like a sincere apology.
“I’m sorry about the Blue Ivy tweet — bad joke, and black girls in particular deserve better.”
However, people blew up his mentions, essentially telling him to “keep it.”
“Sorry? Hardly. Joke? LMAO. Kiki-ing back and forth with your White friend about a little Black girls looks doesn’t sound “sorry”. And if you know ‘Black girls deserve better,’ you would have never said that sht to begin with. Fck you.”
“the REAL moral to this story: Resist the urge to go after/make jokes about other people’s kids — regardless of who their parents are.”
“What was the punch line? Explain it like I’m 5, if you please.”
Collins, however, doubled down, sarcastically responding to people on Twitter who called her out.
“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”
“I’m not playing the victim…sorry that I insulted Beyoncé’s daughter by suggesting that she might get plastic surgery some day, like many children of famous people do”
2020 is already doing the most, y’all.
https://twitter.com/unbuttonmyeyes/status/1212525326867283974
