By Morgan Rowland
Paris Hilton’s rebrand from wild child heiress to pink queen of the y2k resurgence surrounded by her gaggles of girls and gays is one of the most impressive things that I have ever seen. I say this because Paris Hilton is probably one of the most violently racist and homophobic people in Hollywood, and that’s saying something. If it’s deeply offensive and problematic, good chance that she’s done it repeatedly. This includes her and her sister being caught on video in 2007 rapping the words to The Notorious B.I.G’s ‘Hypnotize’ where at one point they scream “we’re like two n-words;” calling a male friend of hers the f-slur multiple times on that same video; in archival footage from the early 2000s she recorded singing a racist remix of the song “We Are Family’ in which she is anti semitic, anti-black and racist to asian people; in 1999 she went on a date with someone from the movie Saving Private Ryan, who many believe to have been Vin Diesel, where she left the date because she thought he was black; in an audio recording from 2012 Paris and her friend are heard making homophobic remarks about gay people having AIDS in the backseat of a Taxi; and she voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election and defended him saying “grab them by the p*ssy,” just to name a few things, but there’s more (BuzzFeed News, 2023). Now, to me literally none of this is surprising, what more can you expect from a rich white girl solely surrounded by other rich white people? What I’m more interested in is that despite the fact that she was doing racist things as recently as 2016 yet is using POC and gay people for her “comeback.”
The ability for a washed up 2000s wild child to make a comeback of this nature is only possible through the power of tiktok. During quarantine a variety of older songs started going viral left and right one of them being That’s Hot by Ayesha Erotica. While Paris is not featured on the song, she is name dropped with Ayesha likening herself to the Hilton hotel’s heiress. Also during quarantine there was a Y2K resurgence with special interest on the “trashy” that ran the fashion of the rich and powerful at the time which Paris Hilton is unarguably the queen of. These things worked together to push Paris’ name back into relevance but what now? If Paris was really going to ‘comeback’ she needed to shed her wild child image and be truly “in” again and what better way to do that than a documentary. A documentary where you never address your violently racist, homophobic, anti semitic past and instead hyper focus on the pains of your childhood. People will empathize with you instead of criticizing you.
Paris knows what she’s doing, she uses popular black and queer creators to change her image and make her “hip” with you people. But this doesn’t change the fact she’s a rich white lady who is completely out of touch with the day to day lives of most of the people that she has offended in her lifetime. It’s simultaneously despicable and impressive, whoever’s running her PR needs a raise. But old habits die hard and I give it a year until she says something problematic and gets “canceled.”
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