Justin and Ami McClure, the parents of the hugely popular McClure twins have some explaining to do after racist tweets surfaced on the dad’s Twitter account.
Almost everyone has heard of the adorable McClure twins, Ava and Alexis McClure, the identical twin sisters who captured the hearts of social media in a viral video. So popular, the adorable 5-year-olds have secured endorsement deals and a Discovery Channel show.
But now their fun family empire is under fire, reports PEOPLE.
The McClure twins public accounts are run exclusively by their parents, a bi-racial couple. And apparentely Dad Justin never deleted his old tweets and now he’s some receiving some heavy backlash online.
“Black people can’t say ‘ask’ ” Justin wrote in one of his now-deleted tweets, “but they have no trouble saying Cadillac Escalade.”
Justin, who now parents three bi-racial kids with wife Ami, even teased about the names black women give their children.
“Dominican women I know: Ilia, Awilda, Janitsy, Zora,” he tweeted in 2011. “Black women I know: Chandelier, Lasagna, Constellation, Walgreens #whenblackpeoplegetpaid.”
That’s a big gut-punch Justin.
In 2012, Justin continued with his racist tweets.
“Lately I’ve been under the impression… Impression is the black girl I went out with,” he tweeted in February 2012. “She loves being on top #blackgirls #ghetto.”
—Gabrielle Union schools stepsons on appreciating dark-skinned women—
In 2014, a year before the twins were born, Justin wrote that a Black woman would one day name their child “Allergies.”
Last week, his wife Ami sat her husband down for a YouTube interview and revealed that she was even shocked those racist tweets existed.
“I was just as surprised and shocked by those tweets from previous days as [the public] was,” Ami says in the video. “This is my first time seeing them as well… I did not know that man. The man that I met and married is the Justin I know today.”
“I know I’m not a racist,” Justin told his wife. “But I look at the things I said, and would a racist person say those things? They would … if I what I say is so offensive to someone else and it’s racist to them, then it’s racist.”
Justin said the tweets were written as comedic material when he was starting out.
Still, Ami, a dark-skinned woman, burst into tears admitting that she once harbored ill feelings towards whites that she’s had to reconcile.
“I don’t know if you can call it racist… but I didn’t like white people,” she said. “Anybody who knows me knows that I did not like white people. And I had to sit to myself and say ‘why?’”
Justin also sat down with the twins to talk about what he learned from the ordeal that almost derailed his career.
“Did you learn your lesson from what you said?” one of the twins asks Justin. “Why didn’t you get a spanking?”
“I did get a spanking,” he replies. “I think I got a spanking from the internet,” he replies.
—Kim Kardashian claps back at haters coming for Kylie Jenner’s Forbes cover—