ABC is still raving about Raven, even if some viewers aren’t so keen on the outspoken View co-host. On Saturday, Oct. 31, the network came to the defense of Raven-Symone following a petition to drop her from the daytime talk show.
“We love Raven,” the network said in a statement. “She is confident, genuine and opinionated, all qualities that make her a great addition to the panel.”
As of Saturday, the petition on Change.org had already garnered over 120,000 signatures in support of removing the 29-year-old co-host from the show, on account of her “ignorant and self hating spiel.”
“African Americans and black people around the diaspora need a voice representative of their views and not a voice representative of what white people want us to say,” the petition read. “We need strong black role models in prominent positions on televisions and Raven-Symone cannot provide that.”
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The petition, originally created on Thursday, Oct. 29, comes hot on the heels of Raven-Symone’s most recent controversial outburst, this time about her thoughts on the Spring Valley High School assault incident.
The former child star defended the police officer who took extreme measures to punish a girl who refused to get off her cell phone.
“The girl was told multiple times to get off the phone,” she said on the segment. “There’s no right or reason for him to be doing this type of harm — that’s ridiculous — but at the same time, you gotta follow the rules in school. First of all, why are there cellphones in school? This shouldn’t even be a problem to begin with, and he shouldn’t have been acting like that on top of it.”
Raven-Symone also previously made controversial comments about how she would not hire an applicant with a “ghetto” name. She later apologized for her off-color remarks, and her father, Christopher B. Permian, even took to Facebook to apologize on her behalf, calling her statements an “inexcusable gaffe.”
