Wendy Williams should've been cancelled way before joking about a TikTok star's death
No hyperbole: Wendy Williams has been a cancer to the ears for decades and, as we've seen recently, hasn't changed one bit. Williams has faced backlash for making fun of the death of 19-year-old TikTok star Swavy recently on her show, the latest example of why the self-proclaimed "Queen of Radio" needs to be cancelled from her throne of scorn.
During her daily "Hot Topics" segment on The Wendy Williams Show, she first asked the audience to clap if they knew who Swavy was, which garnered a smattering of applause from an audience who clearly had never been introduced to his viral videos. She juxtaposed his apparent lack of popularity with her audience with the fact he had more followers than her on TikTok. Williams silently turned around to look at a photo of the child on her screen, eliciting laughter from the crowd, before telling her audience he was murdered Monday morning.
To make matters worse, she then relayed information about the alleged killer's explanation of why he murdered Swavy from the highly reputable (read: consistently false) news outlet MediaTakeOut. Not only did she believe a website that seriously reported Beyonce was lying about her age, but then used the alleged killer's claim of Swavy and his friends attempting to assault him to insinuate Swavy may have had a hand in his own death. To top it off, she doesn't give condolences to Swavy's family, tell him to rest in peace, or even seem remorseful. She just pauses for a few seconds and quickly transitions to talking about how Bruce Springsteen's daughter made it to the Olympics. The blatant disregard for Black life is low for most humans and is barely scratching the surface of the dirt Williams has thrown on people's names over the last 25 years.
You know you're a terror when your tamer insults include claiming the queen Beyonce speaks like she has a fifth grade education, accusing A Tribe Called Quest legend Q-Tip of being gay, and asking an 18-year-old about their virginity live on television. In 2003, she got into a cursing match with Whitney Houston after years of insults, which included saying Houston's plastic surgery resembled "two baseballs on a stick" and constantly referring to her "crack belly," making light of Houston's struggle with drug addiction which turned fatal in 2012. More than a decade later, she proved she hadn't changed her ways by victim blaming Kesha for not setting up a camera and videotaping the producer Dr. Luke's sexual abuse. Just last year, at the age of 55, she asked for men to stop wearing women's clothing before fixing her lips to say "Gay men, you will never be the women we are — no matter how gay, sir."
Williams would've been nothing more than a message board troll without corporate complicity that valued ratings success over human decency. She falsely claimed in 1995 Tupac was raped in prison two years prior, and kept her job at HOT 97 for years afterward. She revealed Method Man's wife Tamika Smith was battling breast cancer without Smith's blessing and kept her job at WBLS. She crudely dismissed Caitlyn Jenner's womanhood in late 2016 because "Caitlyn still has a member" before Jenner had sex reassigment surgery and The Wendy Williams Show has been on the air ever since.
Williams distasteful treatment of Swavy's death is emblematic of her unwillingness to adjust to an America growing more critical of hate being passed off as conventional. In a recent Interview Magazine chat with CNN host Don Lemon, she first claims to not know what cancel culture is and complained about not being able to freely judge people by their sexual promiscuity anymore. "If a girl is a whore, I want to call her a whore. But, I guess, you have to say, 'She’s fast,'" she told Lemon.
How do you start what should be a eulogy for a child by focusing on how you don't know who they are? How do you mention Instagram and TikTok followers more than you give condolences? How do you let your audience spill over in laughter knowing you were about to tell them the person they were laughing at was brutally murdered?
How? You just have to be Wendy Williams and it's easy. And that's why she needs to be gone for good.
