Blind Items Revealed
I really wish I could have witnessed this first hand. I heard it was hysterical. So, this recent network reality star who is more famous for something other than being on a reality show for a bit was walking down the street yesterday in West Hollywood when she was confronted by a very angry man. The reality star has supposedly been dating this B-/C+ primarily television actor and the man on the street was not happy. The gist of the conversation was that the reality star had stolen her man. The reality star thought the person meant like he was a fan of the actor and was just joking about the theft of "his man." Turns out that is not the case at all as he loudly proclaimed right there on the street that until our reality star came along, the man on the street and the actor had been "f**king and sucking" every night but because he could not make him famous he went out and found a "sl*t like you."
Elisabetta Canalis
I remember thinking the man on the street was homeless but reading it now it seems like he wasn't.
ReplyDeleteRegardless, The Actor didn't need either the man on the street or Elizabeth to be made famous, so I'll attribute this to mental illness.
i second that
ReplyDeleteWas the television actor Mehcad Brooks then?
ReplyDeleteIf I remember right, Elisabetta was dating Mechad Brooks last fall, so he must have been the guy she "stole"?
ReplyDeleteSteve OMG....ya know, I always got a weird vibe from the Jackass crew...they had no hesitations when putting things up each other's asses and such. I'm totally ok with it though...LGBT community does not offend me at all.
ReplyDeleteWould explain why she dumped him so fast with all the shouting etc.
ReplyDeleteOops...maybe it wasn't Steve O...I'd forgotten about Eggs. My bad.
ReplyDeleteactor would be Mechad Brooks he played Eggs on True Blood.
ReplyDeleteI guess we know why they had a bad break up.
Another danger of walking the streets of West Hollywood. Random men proclaiming to have fucked and sucked your boyfriend AND calling you a slut. Good times.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the reveal, Enty! Only a couple of weeks until July 4th!!!
Who was she dating?
ReplyDeleteElizabetta is having a VERY bad year isn't she?
ReplyDeleteHighly doubt it was Steve-O cause she has admitted she wanted him back. But I agree with you guys he likes to shove things up hiss ass ALOT, but he doesn't seem to have a gag reflex needed for sucking nightly
ReplyDeleteMy bad, I was thinking of the Clooney.....duh!
ReplyDeleteIn the first Jackass movie, Steve-O refuses to participate in the "matchbox car up the ass for the sake of getting an x-ray and freaking out the doctor" sketch because his dad would not approve. Ryan Dunn ends up doing the stunt.
ReplyDeleteI don't think there are ass fetishes, or gay inclinations in the Jackass gang. Boys do dumb things because they think it's funny. This is normal teenage boy shenanigans and those grown men are teenage boys at heart.
Oh ha ha I remember this one! Steve O wasn't in the picture, it's the black guy (I think) they already mentioned
ReplyDelete@Hunter: surely if you can identify Steve-O by his name, you can identify Brooks by his name, rather than just the color of his skin.
ReplyDeleteSorry. "Mechad Brooks," of whom I've never heard and had to look up vs Steve O with whom I am infinitely more familiar.
ReplyDelete:P
That would also be Steve O aka "that white guy who sticks his tongue out"
DeleteI'm sorry that it seems difficult for you to address your own social blunder without resorting to snark.
ReplyDeleteHunter, I've never heard of Mechad Brooks either. I would have googled him, but I just simply don't care about any of these people. LOL.
ReplyDeleteThanks Bink, yeah I just remember the pap sot of them exiting some hotel
ReplyDeleteOkay, I have a problem with finding offense over someone referring to someone else as "the black guy". He IS black, right? HE knows he's black. If you don't know someone's name when you are referring to someone, I think the default is to try to refer to the most obvious identifier, i.e., "the guy with the mustache", "Susie's little brother", "the Asian guy". I personally have no idea who Mechad Brooks is. I do know who Stevo is. I'd say "the black guy with Stevo", especially if there was more than one other person to whom I could be referring. Under this standard of offense, everyone should be up in arms when the news uses the word "black" as a personal identifier under any circumstances.
ReplyDeleteI fail to see how referring to someone as black when they are, indeed, black, is offensive.
Just my $.02.
Oh I cannot wait for July! ;)
ReplyDeleteOh I cannot wait for July! ;)
ReplyDeleteLola I agree 100% with you
ReplyDeleteOut of touch over here, I don't know who she is... !
ReplyDeleteI agree with Lola as well
ReplyDeleteIt's just guys being guys London?
ReplyDeleteBless you for being waaay more tolerant than I.
If my bf decided to shove a matchbox car up his ass in front of his friends...
Yeah. That would be an interesting (and final) conversation on the ride home.
To stay on topic, I don't get why she's still around (aside from being Clooney sloppy seconds) but she's no Kardashian, so she has that going for her.
I totally agree with Lola, too!
ReplyDeleteA woman freaked out on my mother one day at work. My mom had asked an associate to hand a paper to a girl, but there was a group of girls together, so when asked which one my mom said 'the black girl'
The woman screamed at my mom for being racist so my mom asked her how she would have preferred to be identified and the woman said that she prefers 'of color' (which sounds way too close to 'colored' to me, but whatever). The girl was screaming, trying to get my mom fired it until my mom flipped around a family picture that was on her desk... yup, my step-dad is definitely black and my mom obviously doesn't see anything wrong with someone having darker skin.
Moral of the story: There's still plenty of racism in the world , but don't assign it where there is none.
For hygienic reasons, I'm hoping the man actually was "sucking and THEN fucking" with the actor, cuz otherwise, dude, hygiene, seriously.
ReplyDelete@Barton: as always funny as hell. And ditto on La. Depends upon your era as to what is politically correct. Friends my age still refer to African Americans as black but it's not meant to derogatory.
ReplyDeleteHow many of you guys who don't find that offensive are of color? just curious.
ReplyDeleteI don't find it offensive but then i've never been the type to get my knickers in a knot over an apt description :)
ReplyDeleteLola, I'm glad you brought this up! I have been censoring myself over this issue for a while now, unsure of what the PC rule regarding referring to people who's name you don't remember or don't know.
ReplyDeleteI have red hair and have been referred to by strangers ad "that red head" since I can remember, it doesn't bother me, but I wasn't sure if it was wrong to use a person's race as an "identifier". The way you explained it has clear edit up for me and is 100% spot on.
Thank you
But what would I know, I'm an Aussie and apparently we r spose to be the biggest racists pffft oh did I blink and miss Liz and eggs? I don't remember seeing a pic of them lol
ReplyDelete@Lola and the rest, consider this:
ReplyDeleteI work in a gift shop. We got "multicultural" dolls in. The black ones said "black family dolls" (may have been AA). The Asian said "Asian family dolls". The white ones said "family dolls". Saying "the black guy" is kind of like that. It's not like super offensive. It doesn't make you racist and it's not really a racist thing to say, per se. But I think of it like the dolls. I don't avoid describing by race but I do try to avoid relying on it if possible. I would never get uppity about it.
She dated George Clooney.
ReplyDeleteThe white dolls are just called family dolls? Lol not trying to be funny but it's like they are avoiding the word white, which is weird cause u said there's black family dolls, why not say caucasian instead for the family dolls? Does white remind people of something hateful more than the word black? More PC madness? Not my views just questions that have come up from reading that :)
ReplyDeleteYes I agree bout not describing someone by their race but sometimes that's how people remember them and not being racist at all, it's kinda reverse now like the joke now is all white people look the same now haha oh and just so u know I'm an indigenous Aussie :) black mum white Dad :) and in my experience racists come in all colours available.
ReplyDeleteNot weird at all to call him "the black guy" if you don't know who he is. In a sea of white EC boyfriends, he is "the black guy". Steve O would be "the guy from Jackass", and if Clooney weren't famous, he'd be "the old guy". If EC's bfs were mostly black, Brooks would then be characterized other ways to separate him from the lot ("the tall one", or "the model").
ReplyDeleteAnyway, poor Mehcad LMAO. I imagine the stalker guy was, um, overstating the facts times a million.
Ok, so I guess I'm in the minority here, which I am disappointed by. I just think it's strange to find it completely acceptable to identify people of color by their skin color, while most people never identify whites by theirs. It's not overtly racist to do this, but I definitely think it's a sign of underlying prejudice that has become, unfortunately, ok by most people's standards.
ReplyDelete@djphob....
ReplyDeleteIf there was one white guy, whom I didn't know, in a sea of black guys...and I was trying to point him out, I wouldn't hesitate to refer to him as "the white guy".
I can't speak to the dolls other than to say that perhaps in say, China, the Asian family is referred to as "doll family" and the white family is referred to as "white family".
I personally think it's ridiculous to get all up in arms about perceived discrimination. Would people be up in arms if you referred to "the guy in the wheelchair". Simply recognizing immutable physical identifiers is not discrimination. With all of the real discrimination and racism that really does exist, it seems that wasting energy where it doesn't only dilutes the issue.
If you look hard enough, you can find discrimination anywhere.
And @ecau, not that it matters, because if something is not discriminatory to begin with, it's a moot point...my grandmother was a Cherokee Indian and she didn't give a rat's patootie if anyone referred to her as "Indian" or "Native American". As I pointed out before, SHE knew she was one.
I totally see ecua's point.
ReplyDeleteMuch like with those dolls at a reader's work being displayed and named by their ethnicity (we are all ONE race- the human race- it is scientitfically erroneous to refer to different colors of skin people have as races by the way), anyway, notice that the white doll family is referred simply as 'family dolls' while all the other ethnic dolls were identified by their region based on color. Clearly white dolls are the norm and thus everything is based off them, leaving a binary where there are "family dolls" (read white) and then there are other dolls assigned to the family category.
What I'm trying to say here, and why I see ecua's point, is that most people fail to remember that barely 100 years ago freaking human BRAINS were measured for sanity, intelligence, and more based upon Europeon white male brains. EVERYTHING used to be compared against white ethnicity. So when one identifies a person, instead of saying oh that woman over there (if she were white) some people say oh that black woman over there (it leads one to identify here as first her color then her gender, and for a white woman you naturally often would say her gender alone- as if being white is the norm.
Im babbling here- it's a hot ass day in Cali, but the point is ecua is simply pointing out an unconscious thing many people practice where they identify people by their skin before anything else.
And also, to the person who said their mom offended someone who wanted to be called "of color", it is actually considered respectful now to call anyone with pigmentation "people of color", it's not the same as "colored person" at all.
I work with many people of color. When they are describing they say black girl/ guy to me. I use hair colors often to describe people eho are white...the blonde lady.
ReplyDelete@Jasmine: Yes! Exactly what you said. I was struggling to put into words precisely what you were so eloquently able to.
ReplyDeleteOkay so I never comment on these things but as a black person I just think you all should know that as long as you don't call me a nigger (yes I typed it) then all is well. Black, AA, even Negro or Colored (we laugh @ the last 2) is fine. And for the record if I'm the only black person in a crowd I couldn't imagine another way to describe me than "the black girl". Well...maybe the girl with the amazing ass... ;-)
ReplyDeleteThank goodness we finally have some good honest political debate in this forum. We've wasted much too much time on celebrity gossip.
ReplyDeletejust say African-American saying black is so 90's.
ReplyDeleteanything ecua :))
ReplyDeleteI think anyone who challenges or questions the norm is awesome, number one, so kudos to you for taking on everyone by yourself.
Number two,In this race, class, and gender Sociology class (this is what my BA is in btw) i remember learning that there were countless qualitative studies done where the researcher would interview white males (and some females)who identified as heterosexual and who were middle-to upper class. And (this is where it pertains to this discussion), more than 2/3rds of the interviewees claimed they had NO extra privilege as a straight white person in this society. Many people in western societies absorb the normative of heterosexuality, whiteness and such as so fucking NORMAL that to them it's abnormal or weird for us to point out instances like these that really showcase the binary of all things "white and normal and status quo" against everything else. People can say their personal stories that prove to themselves they arent gender or class or (in this case) "race" specific but because white male heteronormativity has become so inundated in our culture they ARE ALWAYS working in an "us" versus "them" dichotomy. Here's one (very small) example: band-aids at stores are often "skin colored" or "nude". But whose skin color is treated as the basis of this? White people, and pale to tan white people at that. So even in our very band-aids white skin is considered the "natural" tone for skin colored band-aids, ad nauseum.
There are so many facinating books that really break open the matrix, if you will, of how race is played out in our Western societies.
*anytime
ReplyDelete@ecua- I am white and live on Oahu- not the same as being 'of color', but I am definitely a minority here and definitely used to being referred to as 'the white girl' or the 'haole girl'. It does not bother me unless it is meant as an insult. My stepfather feels the same way about being described as black... he is black and doesn't think there is anything wrong with that, so why would he mind being described as such?
ReplyDelete@Jasmine- I know that 'of color' and 'colored' are different, it just sounds so similar to me. I have a feeling that if my mom had said 'hand this to that girl of color' it would not have gone over any better than saying black. And just as you mentioned that we are all part of the human race we are all of color (technically, black is the absence of color. Of course 'black' skin is not actually black). And when referring to someone as white or black that is not describing someone by race, just describing their skin tone just as you would by saying blond or brunette.
I understand your intentions (I totally agree that it is wrong to only see the color of someone's skin), but by calling everything racist it really cheapens and muddies the very real problem that is racism.
B- I hope it didnt seem like I called everyone here racist- TOTALLY not my intent I swear!
ReplyDeleteHOWEVER I think sometimes we dont know we are working with a racist system that is also classist and sexist. So when I hear people say something like "well Im African American and me and my friends dont care if you call us niggas or negros or blacks" that doesnt prove squat to me- other than you are clearly letting yourself be played in a system that continues to oppress people of color, gays, and and gender that idenifies as other than hetero and male. Take a look at the incarceration rates for black men and low socioeconomic status and tell me Im wrong, that our institution is not set up against people of color and classes. All Im saying is there is a whole matrix of how race works in our society and most most most people literally ABSORB it into their daily life and thus have zero concept of what they are ingesting as the norm and the anti-norm. As I mentioned, natural or nude band-aids probably arent questioned by 2/3rs of people for their white-normative association- but it exists nonetheless.
Oh FFS, what's next? Getting offended over being single out by being described by our gender? This pearl clutching is getting out of hand. Pry that stick out of your ass already. I'm sure someone needs the wood.
ReplyDeleteSpare me. Everyone in the "get the stick out of your ass" queue is full of crap. I would have no problem with him being described as "the black guy" had his own name and his character's name not been listed many times in previous comments. Now, I know that eggs will not have the same immense cultural impact of Steve-O, but your motivations were really very transparent. Before you try to pull out the "I was simply too busy to read the previous comments in the thread", stop, take a moment, think "let me accept the pointing out of my ass-hatry with good grace" and let it go. And to the rest of you going "stop being so sensitive" just suck up the reflected light shone on your own ass-hatry. If it makes you feel better, blacks (since AA is so 90's) do it too.
ReplyDeleteAfrican American is a lot of syllables compared to "black." I never say African American because I'm Canadian and I dislike being lumped in with Americans, do urban centres use Afro-Canadian?
ReplyDeleteHow do you pronounce Mehcad? When I do, it rhymes with naked (or "nekkid," depending where I put the emphasis), but I think if it really did rhyme with Naked, that "tidbit" would follow every printed use of his name.
ReplyDeleteThe guy who said this:
ReplyDeletehttp://blackgaygossip.com/index.php/2009/09/17/mehcad-brooks-reveals-he-wont-get-married-until-all-gays-can/
Ewww! Gross! Poor elisawhatever. She should of stuck with Clooney!
ReplyDeleteI worked for 2 years in manufacturing. I was the only woman on my team/shift. If you needed to identify me as the one worker on that shift who, for example, had the document you needed to sign or was the team vacation scheduler, and I was standing across the room with other teammates, would you say, "the teammember with the brown hair", or "the woman over there"? Obviously, you'd describe me with the most-obvious identifyer.
ReplyDeleteSuch eloquent comments! Brava.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI once taught in a school with 99% percent African American students, a few Latinos and one, literally 1, white girl.
ReplyDeleteI am white, and this was an education for me in terms of color identification among African Americans. They referred to EVERYone in terms of their color, but I was chagrined to admit to myself that I had not even thought in terms of gradations of color among African Americans; to me, I'm sorry to say, they were just "black."
I can't even remember all the terms the students had color variations, but they were impressive, like more than 20 maybe?
They didn't hesitate to call me "the white lady" either, as in "you're very friendly for a white lady," etc, which always cracked me up, as they were being complimentary to me while simultaneously revealing their negative assumptions about white people in general.
Mind you, this was 1992, so things may have changed a lot since then.
My point in all this being, it helped me to realize how I just hadn't even THOUGHT about variations in "black" skin color before that.
And I think the point Ecua and others are making is that whites are often oblivious to certain racial facts, like that we consider a certain "whiteness" to be the null hypothesis, and everyone else is described in terms of how they differ from that.
I never use the terms African-American, Mexican-American, Asian-American, etc. If you are a citizen of the United States, you are an American, full stop. A black person born and raised in the USA has no more of a link to Africa than I do for The Netherlands (where my dad was born). Likewise, I never use the term "Native American," either, as everyone born here is a ntive American. Instead, I identify those people, if need be, by their tribe. For instance, my mom is part Sioux. When referring to them, I call them "Sioux."
ReplyDeleteThe Associated Press Stylebook, which I use for my work, says it's OK to refer to someone as black rather than African-American, by the way.
This topic is beginning to get too hung up on calling a person black or African American.
ReplyDeleteMy point (and ecuas)was more about the oblivion whites have to both their white privilege and the way "whiteness can be used as a null hypothesis" (thanks for that succinctness Figgy.)
As I said, I understand where you are coming from, but I don't think it is specific to white people. Many, many times in my life I have been the sole white girl and have been described as such. I was frequently the only white girl in my friends' neighborhoods while growing up in Maryland and I have been the white girl for most of my time living here in Hawaii. I understand that you think it is wrong to have white be the 'null hypothesis', but I can assure you that that thought process exists in any situation where there is seemingly a majority of people with one similarity or another (skin tone, religion, political beliefs... Basically the things that I normally try to avoid talking about)
ReplyDeleteSo I completely agree with the point you are making, although I think that it is a human condition based on my experiences. Where we disagree is on taking offense by it where clearly none is meant.
@texshan I agree with your thoughts on '-American' classifications.
ReplyDeleteI think it is weird to assign a country or continent to a person when they may have no connection with that country/continent at all. Just because someone is black doesn't mean they are from Africa (even though we're all technically from Africa). And there is no way of knowing where someone is from based on skin color alone. I have friends who are dark-skinned and would probably be mistakenly called African-American when they were actually born in America to Dominican parents. Unless I hear people describe themselves as a hyphen American, I don't like to.
Oh man, guys, let's agree to disagree!
ReplyDelete@Jasmine: you're the best!
Mechad Brooks for sure: http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2011/12/elisabetta-canalis-mehcad-brooks-fight-already-over-george-clooney
ReplyDeleteI think of Mehcad as the hot guy on Necessary Roughness. He is smoking --
ReplyDeletehttp://www.imdb.com/name/nm1419635/
He actually has a career going back to early 2002. Elizabeth draws a blank for me except for her famewhore ways.
In the 80's I often worked in retail where we were told to watch black people in the Northeast. I also worked with and was brought up with incredible racists. I prefer not to stereotype. I usually identify by clothes or directional location. I'm not being PC. I lived in a mixed neighborhood as a child and still do. I don't believe for a minute that I'm color blind, just trying to be respectful.
I don't correct my friends who use such identifiers. As some folks mentioned it goes both ways. In New Mexico I was a preppy gringo which was hilarious to me. But it's all in the eye of the beholder.
Jasmine and ecua, you seem to think there is something wrong with being black? Black is beautiful
ReplyDelete