Pop singer Olivia Rodrigo said in a recent Q-and-A with Saturday Night Live actor Bowen Yang that she once believed only white girls could become pop stars.
“I feel like I grew up never seeing that,” she said of nonwhite stars. “Also, it was always like, ‘pop star,’ that’s a white girl,” Rodrigo said.
Perhaps her quote was taken out of context. Perhaps she misspoke. Perhaps, because she was born in 2003, there is some naivete behind the comment. Perhaps she is legitimately unaware of how ignorant the statement is.
Rodrigo is Filipino American, so maybe she was referring specifically to a paucity of Filipino American singers. But Rodrigo grew up in the heyday of Christina Aguilera, one of the most iconic pop stars of the late 90s and 2000s, and during the peak popularity of Colombian Lebanese singer Shakira.
Beyonce is one of the biggest pop singers ever. Rihanna is another enormously popular star while Rodrigo was growing up. Nelly Furtado was not quite as famous as Beyonce or Rihanna, but she was also a big star. There’s also Norah Jones, Alicia Keys, Ashanti, Jennifer Lopez, and Selena Gomez. All of these legendary and iconic singers from when Rodrigo grew up were not “white girls.”
And that does not even take into consideration the pop singers that were big in the decades leading up to Rodrigo’s birth. Brandy, Monica, Lauryn Hill, Mary J. Blige, and iconic industry giants Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston. Don’t forget Tina Turner. Janet Jackson’s success spanned from the 80s to the 2000s. Also, don’t forget that long before them, there came Diana Ross and Aretha Franklin. Ella Fitzgerald was often referred to as the “first lady of song.”
This just seems to be the latest in a long string of deeply ignorant attacks by clueless liberal elites on white people and culture. It would be perfectly legitimate for Rodrigo to say she is a pioneer for Filipino American singers. It is absolutely comical hogwash to say she thought only white girls were ever pop stars before her career launched. It wasn’t true when her mother was growing up — it probably wasn’t even true when her grandmother was growing up.
