Tatyana Ali virtually sat down with Sirius XM’s “The Clay Cane Show” on Wednesday and touched on a variety of topics which included her former co-star on “The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air” Janet Hubert and their personal experiences with colorism. During the interview Ali said “my journey has been interesting. There’s been colorism, but colorism it’s funny. You assume that colorism only comes from the white community and that is sort of put upon us, but there’s also colorism within the Black community. And so I’ve experienced that…I don’t even know if it’s colorism, or if it’s ‘are you black enough? That kind of stuff. In life and in work for sure, will you just make it a little blacker? Or this is recent, where a character description said she’s unapologetically black and I’m like, that’s an interesting thing to put in a description. I know what it means when I’m talking with friends or, but how as an actor, what cues are you trying to give me? What does that mean about this character who happened to be like a corporate person? What does that look like? What is that? So I’ve dealt with those things and my personal beliefs about how I would like to represent, sometimes they don’t match. I’ve come across that. I heard when Janet said that, I know that other people have said that about her. I’ve seen that in social media, but I didn’t know that she felt that way. When we were working together, I mean, we always talked about how beautiful she was. I hope that she knows it for me as a young girl, I saw her with a spotlight on her, and that’s how I thought she was represented on the show. She was in terms of beauty and black beauty and as a young black child, I thought she was radiant and I thought the spotlight was on her, and that was something that I wasn’t use to seeing. I didn’t get a chance to tell her that at the reunion, but if she hears that, I hope that gives her some comfort that for the things that she went through, she meant a lot to a lot of people, to young people.”
BY: BEWITTY Staff
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