African-American Reporter Takes Stand After Body-Shaming

Comments criticizing WFAA Channel 8 News traffic reporter Demetria Obilor over her clothing choice instead sparked outrage over body-shaming.

A woman’s comments that an African-American female news reporter in Dallas “looks ridiculous” in her clothes has sparked outrage on social media.

Wednesday morning, a woman on Facebook posted a photo of WFAA Channel 8 News traffic reporter Demetria Obilor wearing a red dress, criticizing the way she looked in her dress. The post has since been taken down.

“She’s a 16/18 woman in a size 6 dress and looks ridiculous,” the post said. The woman also said she would stop watching the news channel.

Obilor, 26, has been a traffic reporter at the station for two weeks. She was previously a traffic reporter at KLAS-TV in Las Vegas. She said she wasn’t made aware of the post until Friday when someone posted a screenshot of the post on Twitter.

“I’m not a 16/18, but even if I was, for you to try to call out my size like that to hurt me or discriminate against me, I’m not for that,” she told NBC News.

Having been in the business almost four years, she said she isn’t hurt by the comments and has thick skin.

“When you get older and you’re in the news people warn you that, ‘Hey, you’re going to be under a harsh lens. People are going to critique you, people are going to say mean things about you,'” she said.

This isn’t the first time Obilor has been attacked over her looks. Over the summer, while a traffic reporter in Las Vegas, she shared a screenshot of an email from a viewer who said her natural hairstyle must be hard to clean and “smell bad.”

Here's one of the racist, hateful emails I've received for rocking my natural hair on TV. pic.twitter.com/oA8L6gYCyw

— Demetria Obilor (@DemetriaObilor) May 25, 2017

Obilor isn’t alone. Rhonda Lee, a former meteorologist in Louisiana was fired for responding to a viewer who said her natural hairstyle didn’t “look good on TV.”

Obilor, whose mother is white and father is Nigerian, said some people must accept that we now live in a time where styles and body types once rarely seen in media are now being embraced.

“Black people on TV; there’s nothing wrong with that,” she said. “Naturally, curly hair — I don’t care if a black woman wants to wear her hair straight or in braids, you don’t get to say what’s professional …

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