Amid Blake Vigorous’s sordid authorized battle with Justin Baldoni, the embattled “It Ends With Us” star has opened herself to but extra criticism after a TikToker resurfaced a controversial L’Oreal advert she did in 2017, by which she allegedly falsely claimed to be half Cherokee.
The advert for L’Oreal Paris’ “True Match” line of facial foundations featured Vigorous proclaiming, “I’m English, Irish, German and Cherokee. So my family’s sort of from all over.”
After TikToker Stephanie Tleiji reposted the clip on Sunday, it racked up greater than 430,000 likes, with folks accusing the “Gossip Girl” star of “cultural appropriation,” or citing the advert as another excuse to query her credibility in her Baldoni dispute.
The L’Oreal marketing campaign was launched through the Jan. 8, 2017 Golden Globe Awards and was supposed to indicate the cosmetics firm embracing racial and cultural variety in its line of merchandise, in keeping with cosmetics trade commerce publication. As a celeb and a worldwide L’Oreal Paris ambassador, Vigorous was a star of the marketing campaign.
However her proclamation about being half Cherokee instantly stirred controversy, as folks on-line questioned how an actress with blond hair and blue eyes may very well be half Native American, in keeping with a 2017 Yahoo Life report.
It didn’t assist that Vigorous supplied no info to confirm her declare to Native American ancestry, in keeping with Yahoo Life. On the time, Adrienne Keene, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, writer and former assistant professor of ethnic research at Brown College, wrote on X, then Twitter, that Vigorous is “not actually Cherokee,” based mostly on different students researching her family tree going again 15 generations.
Keene, who campaigns towards Native American misrepresentation on her weblog, Native Appropriations, defined to Yahoo Life that some Indigenous have misplaced connections to their tribes as a result of they or their ancestors have been assimilated by power and raised in white households, even experiencing “white privilege” because of this. However Keene stated this case of compelled assimilation doesn’t seem to use to Vigorous.
“When settlers lay claim to native identity as a ‘neat’ ethnic add-on and not as connection to a real, living, contemporary nation, it’s a dangerous affront to tribal sovereignty and Indigenous rights,” Keene informed Yahoo Stay.
Even when Vigorous had some distant Cherokee ancestry, permitting her to blonde-haired and blue-eyed, that doesn’t imply she ought to be capable of declare to be Cherokee, somebody wrote on Tleiji’s TikTok video.
“My dad’s great grandmother was Cherokee, and I still would never claim to be Native,” the particular person stated. “I have such a small percentage that I cannot even imagine talking like Blake did.”
Johnnie Jae, an Otoe-Missouria and Choctaw journalist, podcaster and entrepreneur, agreed that Vigorous’s proclamation for her L’Oreal advert confirmed a “deep-seated ignorance” in regards to the complicated nature of Native American id.
“From what I’ve experienced, most people (who) claim Mative identities only do so for what they think they can gain from it,” Jae informed Yahoo Life. “I think it’s more about being trendy and exotic. I mean, this is the girl who also claimed to have an L.A. face but an Oakland booty.”
Jae was referring to a different of Vigorous’s notorious cultural offenses, when she tried to make use of a Sir Combine-a-Lot lyric to joke about her curvaceous behind on the purple carpet on the 2016 Cannes Movie Pageant. Vigorous additionally has been referred to as out over time for glamorizing the selection she and husband Ryan Reynolds made in 2012 to get married on a Southern plantation with a historical past of slavery. Two years later, Vigorous continued her so-called “Southern Belle fixation” by launching a failed way of life and e-commerce web site that bought dear clothes and residential decor gadgets that have been impressed by “the allure” of the antebellum South.
Such selections made her the goal of fierce on-line backlash — lengthy earlier than the tip of 2024, when she went to the New York Instances and filed a lawsuit to allege that Baldoni, her “It Ends With Us” director and co-star, helped orchestrate a digital media smear marketing campaign towards her with a purpose to retaliate after she spoke up towards him for allegedly harassing her sexually through the film’s manufacturing.
Baldoni has filed a counter-lawsuit, denying the allegations of sexual harassment and retaliation, and accusing Vigorous and Reynolds of attempting to steal his film from him and to break his repute by portraying him as a predator.
In 2017, Vigorous’s L’Oreal 2017 advert prompted Jae to jot down on X: “I hate that as indigenous people we constantly have to address the misappropriation & misrepresentation of our identities.
It’s likely that Lively’s claims of being part Cherokee would be even more controversial — and unthinkable — in 2025. Such a claim would probably run afoul of the growing awareness in recent years about the harm caused by “Pretendians” — folks in leisure, publishing, academia or different professions who falsely declare to be Native American, often with a purpose to acquire status, profitable work advantages or different skilled alternatives.
The problem of Pretendians has burst into the general public consciousness after the sisters of the late Bay Space activist and actor Sacheen Littlefeather claimed that she spent 50 years mendacity about being White Mountain Apache and Yaqui after she grew to become well-known for rejecting Marlon Brando’s greatest actor Oscar on the 1973 Academy Awards. Different distinguished folks, who even have been accused of being Pretendians, embody Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, celebrated singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie and UC Berkeley anthropologist and writer Elizabeth Hoover.
