Friday, December 2, 2011

Gwyneth Paltrow:on racial diversity and the Black community


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'Shakespeare in Love' star Gwyneth Paltrow  has spoken out again about her cutting-edge coming of age experiences, specifically being at the forefront of the reform of race relations in America. Paltrow’s ability to annoy and irritate by being simultaneously unaware of her privilege while condescending every other person in the rest of America is so prolific, and her recent comments about her dad’s work on an 80′s TV show as a testament to her being down-ness is so tone deaf it’s almost offensive.

In an interview that's sure to have her many haters foaming at the mouth, outspoken actress Gwyneth Paltrow sat down with noted author/music executive Steve Stoute for his AOL Huff Post series, The Tanning Effect, and cleared her view on racial diversity and the Black community.  Why Upper East Sider GP is an authority on topics such as Black hair, diversity on magazine covers and representations of Black people in the media seems limited to the fact that her father, Bruce Paltrow, created a groundbreaking television show (The White Shadow, about a white guy who teaches basketball to inner-city kids) and her friendship with her besties, Jay-Z and Beyoncé. Nevertheless, here's some of what she had to say:


This 39 year-old Oscar- and Golden Globe-winning actress said,  ”And that show that he did — I mean, obviously we were there a lot, but it was interesting to see that culturally start to permeate. And he did a lot of ‘firsts’ on that show. He had the first interracial kiss ever. It was a good show.” (Editor’s Note: As a point of fact, the first televised interracial kiss was between William Shatner and Nichelle Nichols on “Star Trek” in 1968.)

Paltrow added, “I don’t want to bemoan the fact that it should’ve happened 50 years ago, because it’s here now. And it’s like the way I see it is that I have two little kids who are understanding the world in a time when Rihanna is on the cover of Vogue, and we have a black president. So their eyes are being as if they’re experiencing the world for the first time… When my daughter understood what a president was, it was a black man. It’s not like me, where I grew up with all of these old white guys one after another … Their perspective on race and everything is completely open and completely different to how it was when I was a kid.”