Let's Not Call Little Girls "See You Next Tuesdays"

This is Quvenzhané Wallis.

It's pronounced (kwa van je nay). 

From all that I've read, she pretty much knocked it out of the park in the movie Beasts of the Southern Wild. She must have. She was nominated for an Oscar. At nine years old. At nine years old, I didn't have the where-with-all to take the spatula out of my Easy Bake Oven and forever warped it.

She's also super cute and has a collection of puppy purses that she brings to all the award shows she attends.

Well, I had really never given her much thought until I was cruising through my Twitter and saw that the people who were live-tweeting the Oscars were all of a sudden outraged. People were outraged for two reasons: Seth McFarlane's off-color,  marginally funny joke and The Onion's crude, really inappropriate joke.

McFarlane seemed to be trying to take a stab at George Clooney, stating “to give you an idea of how young she is, it’ll be 16 years before she’s too young for Clooney.”

Not bad, just weird. And not that funny, Seth.

But the shit really hit the fan when The Onion posted this tweet:

Um, what? Let's not go there. Let's not go and call a nine-year-old, that really and truly did nothing wrong a "see-you-next-Tuesday."

When I read the tweet, I was like "really?" When a lot of people from the Black community read the tweet, they were upset, furious, pissed. Really, really mad. The tweet that was supposed to be light-hearted and satirical, became a huge race thing. Here's a sampling:

As someone that believes herself to pretty racially aware, I didn't get that from the tweet at all. The tweet stopped me in my tracks, made me audibly gasp, but not because it was directed at a little black girl but because it was directed at a young girl. Someone innocent, naive, unadulterated by all things Hollywood. All I keep thinking is that when she's older, she'll Google herself and likely come across that tweet before positive reviews of her work. And that's an incredibly sad fate for someone that is the youngest ever Best Actress nominee.

ThinkProgress.com sums it up better than I could:

In other words, of all the available targets at the Dolby Theater, all the directors who have asked the actresses in Seth MacFarlane’s boorish musical number to take off their tops, all the executives who are obsessed with their bottom lines until the couple of months a year when they’re required to talk about great art, and the great age and overwhelming whiteness and maleness of the Oscar voters, you pick a child? Courageous humor punches up, rather than down, and effective humor exposes something meaningful about the target. Maybe the Oscars stage with that vaunted billion-person audience isn’t the right place to tell big truths about Hollywood, but it’s not a hard position from which to reveal some small ones with craft and finesse.

Essentially, The Onion missed the mark on the funny. They could have taken a stab at literally almost anyone else in that theater and probably gotten some positive retweets. We as a country have learned to laugh about most things. But the young ones haven't had that lesson yet. To me, it just seems unfair she'll have to learn it sooner rather than later.