At the beginning of the episode, Jada revealed that Olivia had called her and "wanted to come to our table." She added that her mother Adrienne and daughter Willow "all had very different feelings about it."
"I fought it tooth and nail," Adrienne admits. "I just found it really ironic that she chose three Black women to reach out to for her redemption story. I feel like here we are, [a] white woman coming to Black women for support when we don't get the same from them. Her being here is the epitome of white privilege to me."
Jada replied, "I understand where you’re coming from but let me just be clear: I never want to be the thing that was done to me by white women."
i found the debate over whether
#RedTableTalk should give Olivia Jade a platform infinitely more interesting than anything Olivia had to say.
pic.twitter.com/OWO9lzXb8M- Jarett Wieselman (@JarettSays)
December 8, 2020 After joining the ladies at the table, Olivia said, “there is no justifying or excusing what happened. Because what happened is wrong, and I think every single person in my family can [say], ‘That was messed up; that was a big mistake.’ But I think what’s so important to me is to learn from the mistake-not to now be shamed and punished and never given a second chance. Because I’m 21; I feel like I deserve a second chance to redeem myself to show that I’ve grown.”
“I think there was a college counselor involved who seemed legitimate, and who ended up not being legitimate, and in that community, it was not out of the ordinary. And it’s embarrassing to say that I didn’t know.” She also said multiple times that she was not fully aware of the fraud that went into her application.
Olivia Jade also recalled finding out about the scandal while on spring break-and feeling too embarrassed to return to school at the University of Southern California afterward. “I was sitting with a group of friends, and I knew any second everybody was gonna know, too, if they didn’t already,” she said. “I remember just freezing and feeling so ashamed. I went home and hid myself for probably three or four months... I shouldn’t have been [at USC] in the first place, clearly, so there was no point in trying to go back.”
“I’m not trying to victimize myself,” the influencer added later. “I don’t want pity; I don’t deserve pity. We messed up. I just want a second chance to be like, ‘I recognize I messed up.’ And for so long, I wasn’t able to talk about this because of the legalities behind it. I never got to say, ‘I’m really sorry that this happened.’”
Now, Olivia Jade says she’s begun volunteering with young children at an afterschool program, and is looking for more ways to get involved in such causes-rather than just “throwing money” at the problem.
“I want to invest myself,” she said, “so that I can start to understand.”
Not everyone at the table was forgiving with Adrienne saying "I think for me, it’s like there is so much violent dehumanization that the Black community has to go through on a daily basis. There is so much devastation, particularly this year, 2020, with the pandemic and everything brought to the table about how there is so much inequality and inequity, that when you come to the table with something like this, it’s like, 'Child, please.'"
"I'm exhausted. I'm exhausted with everything we have to deal with as a community and I just don’t have the energy to put into the fact that you lost your endorsements or you’re not in school right now," she continued. "Because at the end of the day, you’re going to be OK. Because your parents are going to go in and they’re going to do their 60 days and they’re going to pay their fine, and you guys are going to go on and be OK and you will live your life. And there’s so many of us that it’s not going to be that situation. It just makes it very difficult right now for me to care in this atmosphere that we’re in right now."
She added "A year from now I might feel differently, but right now in the atmosphere that the world is in it’s very difficult for me to feel compassion for you. And I shouldn’t say 'about you' because I don't want you to take it that personally. It’s not really about you."
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