To promote her new makeup line, Kim Kardashian tweeted a photo of herself that was run through an Instagram-like filter. That’s basically the story here. But the world being what it is, she was immediately accused of putting on blackface.
Kardashian took the opportunity to articulately explain the hateful history of blackface, and how it has been used to marginalize African Americans for centuries. I’m just kidding, she said “I was really tan.”
This came at the end of folks on Twitter parsing all sorts of different words, and trying to figure out who meant what. It was an incoherent mess, so the super-sleuth reporters at the New York Times decided to clear things up. Here’s the quote Kim gave them in full:
“I would obviously never want to offend anyone. I used an amazing photographer and a team of people. I was really tan when we shot the images, and it might be that the contrast was off. But I showed the image to many people, to many in the business. No one brought that to our attention. No one mentioned it.”
That’s not exactly an apology, but it’s just so Kim. At the end of the day, people who want to hate her will keep finding a reason to, and her fans will be pretty into this explanation.