Wendy WilliamsBy James Bryce
AMERICAN megastar Kelis has hit out at the ‘disgusting’ racial issues after claiming she was verbally abused by a British traveller at a Spanish airport.
The singer says she was called a ‘slave’ and ‘a disgusting Nigerian’ by a fellow passenger who believed she had jumped the queue at passport control.
She claims the man, who she described as a ‘fat, red-faced sweaty man’, also referred to her as ‘Kunta Kinte’, the name of a slave in Alex Haley’s seminal book about the slave trade, Roots.
The 32-year-old also condemned a Spanish passport official for laughing at the jibe, following the flight from Gatwick, believed to be to Malaga.
The singer – who has had 10 top 10 singles in the UK, including Milkshake – used her Twitter account to express her anger at the persistence of racism in the UK.
“It’s racially decades behind progression because everything is swept under the rug. People don’t talk about it. People don’t fight about it,” she said.
It was initially claimed that the incident took place in the UK, but Kelis later clarified that it had occurred on arrival in Spain following her performance at Bestival on the Isle of Wight.
The star was previously married to US rapper Nas, with whom she has a child.
Prejudice everywhere. Shame. Pity about Kelis’s “fatist” jibe and she does admit obliquely she pushed into the line in her own blog. She should have been told politely to get to the back of the queue and her antagonist given a loud, public, time consuming dressing down by the police, but bear in mind there is two sides to this as with everything.
Well, my wife was called an ape by a brit, visiting the neighbours. She is from the african continent. I had to explain to her that there are civilised brits, and a large group of humanoids called ‘the great unwashed’. I do not know who is at present in the majority.
There are horrible people everywhere nowadays and to my mind, many more than in my youth.
We can only apologise to Kelis on behalf of these people. The only excuse I can offer is that some people are also travelling in an emergency, sick relatives, accidents, etc., are in an emotional state and do not realise their offensiveness.