Glee star Naya Rivera responded to a Twitter backlash Wednesday, created after she generalized the bathing habits of ethnic people on Tuesday’s The View, and insisted she was only joking.
The actress returned to the show Wednesday to further explain her previous comments, and contended that it was simply a misunderstanding.
“Showering. Biggest topic in pop culture today, in my opinion. Thanks to me, unfortunately,” she said. “Yesterday, we were talking about a study that says you’re supposed to shower once or twice every three days,” she said during the Hot Topics section.
“I had an opinion on it that was supposed to be a joke. Apparently it didn’t go over so well. It was supposed to be a joke, but I apologize if anyone was offended.” She finished, before reading some of the tweets she’d received from angry Twitter followers.
Rosie O’Donnell then contributed to the conversation, saying she’d read that “doctors say that you should take a bath” anyway, to which Samantha Ponder replied, “No. A bath? You sit in your own filth when you take a bath!”
Rivera originally told the show, “I have a theory about showering … which is I think that white people shower a lot more than ethnics.” She continued saying, “I think that, like, showering more than once a day or every day is such a white people thing.”
The actress went on to cite information from her dermatologist that a person should only shower once or twice every three days, and said she believed she was “right on the mark.”