I love the actress behind Glee's Santana, but I'm really disappointed in the "joke" she made on The View on Monday about "ethnics" not showering as much as white people. After a receiving a huge amount of backlash from her comments, Rivera stopped by The View again on Wednesday to apologize — kind of. But rather than taking the blame and acknowledging the implications of her words, Rivera kept insisting that it was a joke. Worse, her co-hosts joined in to defend her.
Just to remind you, this is what Rivera originally said on Monday: “I have a theory about showering, which is I think that white people shower a lot more than ethnics. I think that showering more than once a day, or every day, is such a white people thing." Then on Wednesday's show, Rivera did attempt to say sorry. She did. It's just that her apology was riddled with excuses.
That was supposed to be a joke. Apparently it didn't go over so well. It was supposed to be a joke, but I apologize if anyone was offended. However, I'm very excited that it sparked a big conversation about how many times you should shower.
Rivera hardly seems sorry at all, which isn't surprising given the cavalier attitude she had on Twitter when the criticism first started pouring in.
Although technically Rivera did say she was sorry if anyone was offended, she didn't really apologize for the content of what she said. Instead, she just apologized for the fact that people were upset about it. To make matters even worse, her co-hosts all jumped to her defense and turned things into an even bigger joke. Nicole Wallace, an admitted three-times-a-day showerer, said this of Rivera's opinion: "I actually thought you were more on a reasoned side of this, so I'd like to defend you today."
Then guest-host Mario Cantone jumped in with an awkward joke of his own, directed at Rivera. "I went into your dressing room today and I grabbed you and we got naked, we got into a shower, and I scrubbed her back furiously," Cantone said. "Back off Naya. She's very clean."
Look, the point here isn't about whether or not you should shower every day or every three days. Maybe Rivera is right that people shouldn't shower so often. But it's the way that she stated her opinion that was wrong. Rather than speaking for only herself, or simply referencing a study that says lots of showering is bad, she chose to make things about race. She developed a theory based on pretty much no statistical data, just random assumption, and then she announced it like it was fact.
As Bustle's Kadeen Griffiths pointed out, "The stereotype that African-Americans are 'dirty' or 'contaminated' is a particularly insidious and long-running one," and now Rivera is adding to it and acting like it's totally OK to joke about. Her apology was hardly an apology at all, and The View hosts just added to the controversy by completely overlooking the very real negative affects the "joke" could have. I'm disappointed that these things were said in the first place, but the worst thing is that nobody even learned anything from it.
