Raven-Symone Sparks Outrage for Saying She Would Discriminate Against Black People with ‘Ghetto’ Names

Arnold Turner/AP
Arnold Turner/AP
Kelli Serio
New York, NY

The View co-host Raven-Symone sparked an Internet controversy after Thursday’s show for saying she would have no problem discriminating against potential job applicants with “ghetto” names if she were an employer.

During a conversation about a new UCLA study published in the Journal of Evolution and Human Behavior, which chronicles possible racial bias for people with stereotypical, black-sounding names, Raven said she would not consider a person for employment with a name such as “Watermelondrea,” according to PEOPLE.

After the show played a viral video of the 60 most “ghetto names” from YouTube, Raven-Symone went off.

“Just to bring it back, can we take back ‘racist’ and say ‘discriminatory,’ because I think that’s a better word,” she said during the show. “And I am very discriminatory against words like the ones that they were saying in the video.”

The 29-year-old added: “I’m not about to hire you if your name is Watermelondrea. It’s just not going to happen. I’m not going to hire you.”

Check out the viral video below, which has more than 31 million views:

UCLA researchers claimed through their many findings that people tend to envision men with stereotypically black names as larger and more violent.

Additionally, through studies involving more than 1,500 people, UCLA found that an unknown black male is “conceived of similarly to an unknown white male who has been convicted of assault,” according to the report.

The study’s lead author, research scientist Colin Holbrook, said of the report: “I’ve never been so disgusted by my own data.”

Holbrook’s disgust seems minor when compared to the backlash Raven-Symone has received on Twitter following her remarks:

https://twitter.com/The_BeautifulB/status/652871870283444224

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