Hilaria Baldwin said that it's "hard to belong" as a person with "multi& very valid" cultures.- Baldwin appeared to be doubling down on her Spanish heritage controversy from December 2020.
- "There are people who want to deny others their right to belong," she wrote on
Instagram .
Hilaria Baldwin said it's "hard to belong" as a person with "multi" and "very valid" cultures while appearing to address critics who spoke out against her during her Spanish heritage controversy in December.
In a lengthy Instagram caption paired with a photo of her oldest daughter, Carmen, on Thursday, Baldwin opened up how she'd discussed her "painful experience" as a person with a "fluid" cultural background with her family.
"We discussed belonging& how there are people who want to deny others their right to belong," she wrote. "When you are multi, it can feel hard to belong."
Baldwin went on to say that it's hard for a multicultural person to "quite fit in because the other parts of you shape and influence all your parts," adding that everyone should be able to "to curate our individual expressions of our cultures, languages, who we love, what we believe in, how we dress, present ourselves."
Representatives for Baldwin didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
A viral Twitter thread claimed that Baldwin had spent years 'tricking' people into thinking she was from Spain
Baldwin was heavily scrutinized in late December 2020 after a viral Twitter thread claimed that the yoga instructor had spent years misleading others to think she was from Spain by faking her accent and changing her name to Hilaria from Hillary.
The same Twitter thread resurfaced clips of Baldwin (who has no Spanish heritage and was born to white American parents in Boston) speaking with a Spanish accent and appearing to forget the English word for cucumber during a 2015 "Today" appearance.
Insider reporter Kim Renfro also outlined many other instances where Baldwin made Spanish social-media posts, talked about "incorporating Latin culture" into her children's lives, and participated in several interviews where she's referred to as being "Spanish-born" or "Spanish-American."
Baldwin responded to the backlash from the viral thread scrutinizing her ethnicity with an Instagram video where she said she "grew up with two cultures" and "speaking two languages."
"I'm born in Boston, and then I spent some of my childhood in Boston, some of my childhood in Spain," Baldwin said in the December 2020 video. "There was, like, a lot of back-and-forth my entire life."
"I've seen some things about, like, 'She's a white girl.' Yes, I am a white girl. I am a white girl," she said. "Let's be very clear that Europe, you know, has a lot of white people in there. And my family is white. Ethnically I'm a mix of many, many, many things. Culturally I grew up with the two cultures. So it's really as simple as that."
Baldwin appeared to double down on those sentiments in Thursday's Instagram caption, saying that people "need to normalize the fact that we are all unique-our culture, languages, sexual orientations, religions, political beliefs are ALLOWED TO BE FLUID."
"What they shouldn't do is devalue," she wrote. "You are valid, worthy &you don't need to explain or get into the uncomfortable 'prove it' conversation."
Baldwin added: "People will try to find reason to invalidate you, therefore their attacks seem justified in their eyes. They can hate, poke fun & shame-because you 'asked for it' through your audacity to be you."