Hulk Hogan fell hard from grace last month when a recording of him making racist comments in 2008 surfaced online. Not only was the wrestling icon dropped from his contract with WWE, but he has been facing a mountain of criticism ever since. Although Hogan may be guilty of racism, his daughter Brooke Hogan thinks the public needs to forgive him and she also wants the world to know, of all things, that she’s experienced racism, too.
As previously reported, Hogan made the racist comments in a 2008 sex tape in which he used the n-word to describe a Black man Brooke was dating at the time.
In an interview with “Entertainment Tonight,” Brooke discussed her father’s racist remarks and said, “He’s my dad. I love him and the reason I’m standing by his side on this whole thing is because I know him, and it’s so easy for people to just — they need something to jump down people’s backs about… He’s an easy target.”
Brooke said her dad was “at the lowest point in his life” when the tape was made and he simply made a bad decision like everyone else has.
“I understand when people are writing me mean tweets and saying your dad’s this and [that] … [but] I wish I could talk to them and just say, ‘Have you ever been really mad at somebody and just said the worst about them?’ … It’s not that my dad thinks that, and that’s not how we were raised,” she said.
However, Brooke makes a mistake of her own in the interview when she blatantly compares the racism that black people have experienced to racism or discrimination she’s experienced as a white woman.
“I feel bad for my dad, but I also feel bad for the African-American fans and stuff because they don’t know that he didn’t mean it,” she said. “You know, it would be offensive. But this is something that we have to put a stop to everyday, because I’ll be honest with you, I’ve had a black guy call me a honkey, and I’ve also been told that white people smell like bologna. I don’t take offense to it; I just laughed at it.”
We understand why Brooke is defending her dad; any daughter in her shoes would. But her weak comparisons naively diminish the systematic racism black people in America experience daily. As a white person, she can be called a honky and told she smells like bologna and simply laugh it off, knowing those words have no impact on her everyday life, image and welfare. But black people don’t have the same luxury and privilege. For us, words like n—– have been stuck to our collective identity for centuries and still work to dehumanize us in the eyes of the world.
Brooke may not want to see her dad as a racist, but it’s clear she also doesn’t want to see her own privilege and blindness to racism and racial inequalities.
But that’s not all that Brooke had to say while defending her father. Read the rest of her comments after the cut.
