Blake Lively has got herself in a fair amount of hot water recently after she posted a picture to Instagram with a ‘racist’ caption.
While at Cannes Film Festival for the red carpet premier of her latest film, Cafe Society, Lively posted a photo of her face and derrier, featuring the caption’L.A. face with an Oakland booty,’ a line from Sir Mix-a-Lot’s ode to big butts, ‘Baby Got Back.’
The line ‘LA Face with an Oakland Booty’, is pretty much exactly what it says – LA face refers to a woman who’s face looks like she’s from Los Angeles, whereas her ‘booty’ looks like it’s from Oakland – a neighbouring city with a large African American population, the Sydney Morning Herald reports.
The actress quickly found herself at the sharp end of controversy, with many claiming her caption was ‘disrespectful’ and ‘racially insensitive’.
But there’s one prominent person who’s on Lively’s side – and that’s Sir-Mix-A-Lot himself.
Speaking to the Hollywood Reporter, Mix-A-Lot spoke in length about how his song was never about race, but about his desire for different beauty standards to be acknowledged within mainstream media.
He said:
That song was written with African-American women in mind, but trust me, there are white women with those curves everywhere, and they were once considered fat. And that’s what the song was about. It wasn’t about some race battle.
So I wrote this song not as a battle between the races. I wrote the song because I wanted Cosmopolitan, I wanted all these big magazines to kind of open up a little bit and say, ‘Wait a minute, this may not be the only beautiful.’ I mean, I don’t look at Serena Williams as fat. I don’t think she has an ounce of fat anywhere on her. I didn’t want there to be one voice. I wanted to say, ‘Hey, us over here! What we feel like is this.’
So there you have it, the scholar of ‘LA face with an Oakland booty’ is fine with Blake Lively’s Instagram post.
Maybe with the help of Sir-Mix-A-Lot the Internet will calm down a tad.
