Kalen Allen reacted after a months-old clip of Raven-Symoné’s podcast “Tea Time with Raven and Miranda” put Raven Baxter’s race up for debate.
The internet has turned its ire on Raven-Symoné — once again — only this time, internet personality and television host Kalen Allen has been caught in the crossfire.
On Tuesday, Sept. 1, after a months-old clip of Allen and Raven discussing her beloved character from the hit Disney Channel series “That’s So Raven” resurfaced and Raven Baxter’s Blackness suddenly became a matter of debate, setting off a firestorm of backlash, Allen revealed he’s been receiving death threats.
“Sending me death threats for something I didn’t say is taking it too far. Be f— for real,” he began in a post on Threads.
“I SAID RAVEN BAXTER WAS BLACK AF. Literally. Those were my words. ‘Raven Baxter was Black as f—,’” he continued. “She was Black to me. So critique me for not asking another question. Critique me for not pushing back harder. I’ve watched it back, sat with it, and I actually think that criticism is fair. I initiated the conversation. I could have followed up. I should have. I can own that.”
He added, “But what we are NOT going to do is turn ‘Kalen didn’t challenge her enough’ into ‘Kalen agreed with her.’ Because I did not. And since ‘that’s fair’ has apparently become the prosecution’s Exhibit A, let me clarify that too.”
Allen went on to explain that the viral moment came after an earlier discussion about “Absolutely Psychic,” the original concept that eventually became “That’s So Raven.” Initially, Raven auditioned for the project when it centered on a different lead character, and she was up for the role of the best friend before the concept was reworked around her. Allen said that context informed how he understood Raven’s later comments about whether Raven Baxter was conceived specifically as a Black character — and why he responded the way he did in the moment.
“Do not invent a position for me and then punish me for having it,” he wrote. “And please learn the difference between accountability and abuse. Because sending somebody death threats over a Disney Channel discourse is fucking insane. Be f— for real. LEAVE ME ALONE!”
Since the original clip from “Tea Time with Raven and Miranda,” Raven’s entertainment podcast with her wife, Miranda Pearman-Maday, the conversation has grown well beyond a disagreement over a Disney Channel character. Raven is facing widespread backlash, old controversies have been dredged back up, her wife has been catching strays, and this isn’t even getting into all of the green memes. Yet, as Allen and others have begun pointing out, some of the loudest reactions also appear to be missing crucial context — from what Raven said throughout the full conversation to the basic fact that Allen wasn’t interviewing her at all. He was a guest on her podcast. Somewhere in all of this is a story about Raven’s ever-complicated relationship with her Black fans, but there’s also one about our increasingly complicated relationship with media literacy.
For starters, the episode isn’t new. It originally aired in April, and why it began circulating months later remains unclear. While the clip being reshared can certainly leave the impression that Raven is declaring, somewhat unprovoked, that Raven Baxter wasn’t Black, her full comments aren’t quite so easily summarized.
Toward the end of the episode, during a larger and much more nuanced conversation about race, Raven says, “I love my Blackness,” while explaining that her Blackness can “look so many different ways.” Allen jumps in, suggesting part of the public’s fascination with how Raven identifies may come from the fact that Raven Baxter was “so f— Black.”
“Was she Black?” Raven interjects. “Why did she feel Black to you?”
Allen explains that, for him, it was seeing a Black family at the center of a Disney Channel show. Raven pushes him further, eventually asking him to imagine taking away their skin color.
“Take away the color. Make them green, and hear the words. What color are they?” she adds.
One completely fair reading of that exchange is exactly what many people heard: Raven questioning whether Raven Baxter was Black. Another is that Raven is questioning whether Baxter’s Blackness defined her at all. Raven Baxter was unmistakably a Black girl, living in a Black family, and the series at times even dealt explicitly with racism. At the same time, she was also a psychic teen worried about boys, clothes, school, her friends, and whatever ridiculous scheme she had gotten herself into that week. The universality of Raven Baxter doesn’t have to take away from her Blackness. In fact, Black girls getting to simply exist as girls is part of what made that representation matter in the first place.
Now, of course, people aren’t reacting solely to what Raven said in this conversation. If we’re being fair, they’re reacting to more than a decade of complicated moments surrounding Raven and her Blackness.
In 2014, she famously told Oprah Winfrey, “I’m not an African American. I’m an American,” a comment she has since said was never intended to mean she wasn’t Black and one she acknowledged has “haunted” her for years. The following year, while discussing discrimination against people with Black-sounding names on “The View,” Raven said she wouldn’t hire someone with a name like “Watermelondrea,” comments she later apologized for and called “in poor taste.” That same year, she also drew criticism for saying she would have preferred Rosa Parks over Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill because Parks was “closer to the progression that we’re doing now.”
So it’s not hard to understand why some people see a pattern or why a 39-second clip can land differently when it comes from Raven-Symoné. Over time, an idea of Raven has developed alongside the actual woman, one that can make every new conversation about race feel like confirmation of everything some fans already believe about her.
Raven is also entitled to be complicated, though. She grew up in front of us, entering the entertainment industry as a small child before becoming a tween and teen star at the height of Disney Channel’s cultural dominance in the 2000s. And she did so as a Black girl with a bigger body while working in an industry that held girls to incredibly narrow, overwhelmingly Eurocentric standards of beauty and marketability. Raven herself has spoken about losing opportunities because of her skin color, body size, and age. It’s entirely possible that a lifetime spent navigating all of that left some scars or complicated some things.
None of that excuses anti-Blackness. It does, however, leave room for empathy. At some point, if we’re going to talk seriously about the ways people can internalize the very biases that hurt them, we also have to leave room for people to unpack, unlearn, and grow. Loving each other through our complicated parts has historically gotten us a lot further than shaming each other for having them.
This latest Raven discourse also begs the question of whether or not we always know what we’re watching anymore. Allen was not the host of this episode. He was a guest on “Tea Time with Raven & Miranda.” He was not conducting a hard-news interview, and despite his own admission that he wishes he had pushed back more, interrogating Raven’s racial politics was not his assignment. This wasn’t “Meet the Press.” It wasn’t Joy Reid. It was a conversation on an entertainment podcast.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with criticizing what happens in those spaces. Love Keke and the girls, but we also have to be responsible consumers of the content we watch. A viral clip isn’t always the full conversation. A guest isn’t suddenly an interviewer. An entertainment podcast isn’t automatically journalism. And our timelines, no matter how convincingly they package something for us, shouldn’t get to do all of our consuming or thinking on our behalf.
Maybe Raven meant exactly what some people believe she meant. Maybe she didn’t. Neither possibility actually requires us to declare one way or the other. But it does require listening closely enough to know what was actually said, understanding what we’re watching, and leaving enough room for context.
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