Trans model Munroe Bergdorf slams L’Oréal for firing her and calls for boycott
Transgender model and activist Munroe Bergdorf has slammed L’Oréal for firing her and called on her followers to boycott the company.
The cosmetics brand announced this week that Bergdorf would head up a new makeup campaign for the company, making her the first trans woman to do so.
However, within days of the announcement, L’Oréal fired Bergdorf.
The company stated that they fired her over a Facebook post which Bergdorf had written in which she condemned the rise of white supremacy.
In the post, the 29-year-old wrote that all she did not have the “energy” to keep discussing “the racial violence of white people anymore. “Yes ALL white people.”
The post was weeks old and written in response to the Charlottesville violence that saw one person killed and many more injured as far right demonstrators from the KKK and other white supremacist groups clashed with counter-protesters.
Taking to Facebook after L’Oréal announced that she was fired, the model defended the initial post and said that the company was one of many at fault of ignoring people of colour in their products.
“Identifying that the success of the British Empire has been at the expense of the people of colour, is not something that should offend ANYONE. It is a fact. It happened,” Bergdorf started.
“In today’s society the lighter your skin tone (people of colour included) the more social privileges you will be afforded. Whether that’s access to housing, healthcare, employment or credit.
“A person’s race and skin tone has a HUGE part to play in how they are treated by society as a whole, based on their proximity to whiteness,” she wrote.
Bergdorf went on to explain that when she wrote “all white people are racist” she was talking about the system of western society which is “designed to benefit, prioritise and protect white people before anyone of any other race.”
She then addressed how she was furious that L’Oréal fired her over essentially talking about her own experience with racism.
“When a transgender woman of colour, who has been selected to front up a big brand campaign to combat discrimination and lack of diversity in the beauty industry, speaks on her actual lived experience of being discriminated against because of her race and identifies the root of where that discrimination lies – white supremacy and systemic racism – that big brand cannot simply state that her thoughts are not ‘in line with the ethics of the brand’.
“If you truly want equality and diversity, you need to actively work to dismantle the source of what created this discrimination and division in the first place.
“You cannot just simply cash in because you’ve realised there’s a hole in the market and that there is money to be made from people of colour who have darker skin tones.
“The irony of all this is that L’Oréal Paris invited me to be part of a beauty campaign that ‘stands for diversity’.
“Racism may be a jagged pill to swallow, but I suggest you force it down quickly if you want to be part of the solution. Doing nothing, does nothing and solves nothing.” she added.
