Raven Symone: ‘I am from every continent in Africa except for one’

Last year, Raven-Symone caused a bit of a kerfuffle when she sat down for an interview with Oprah and they ended up talking about race. Raven declared: “I’m not an African American; I’m an American…And that’s a colorless person. I don’t label myself.” Which, I mean, more power to her. Race is a social construct more than anything else. Still, Raven got a lot of comments and she ended up clarifying her remarks, saying: “I never said I wasn’t black … I want to make that very clear. I said, I am not African-American.”

In the midst of that Oprah interview, Raven mentioned that she didn’t really know much about her ancestry beyond the fact that her family mostly comes from Louisiana. In the past few months, it looks like ancestry.com got in touch with her and she agreed to do an entire DNA work-up. She mentioned this during an interview with Alicia Quarles for E! and #VIBELeague. Alicia asked Raven about her comments about not being African-American, and Raven ended up saying… (SMH)… “Thank you to ancestry.com for sending me my DNA test. I am from every continent in Africa except for one and I’m also from every continent in Europe except for one.”

As you can imagine, Twitter had a field day. Some of the tweets are really funny, some of them are a bit mean and some of them are just a pile-on. I totally make those kinds of mis-statements all the time, but I’d like to think I catch myself after a second. Like, she could have just said, “Wait, what did I just say? I meant country, not continent! Brain-fart, my bad.” The fact that she said it so proudly and without reservation… LOL. And she still hasn’t said anything about it on Twitter either.