Hilaria Baldwin reflects on people being ‘mean’ amid her accent controversy

Hilaria Baldwin is still reeling from the backlash sparked by her accent.

The entrepreneur and yoga instructor — who was raised bilingual — has long faced criticism over the authenticity of her Spanish accent. Looking back on the controversy during the latest episode of her reality show, The Baldwins, Hilaria spoke candidly about her tendency to code-switch.

“Growing up in a way where you have multiple cultural influences on you means that you’re never going to be able to fit in,” she shared. “You can try. You can chameleon. You know, people who code-switch we’re very good at chameleoning… and you’re not even thinking about it. It’s just normal. It’s just natural.”

Hilaria, who stars in the TLC show alongside husband Alec Baldwin and their seven kids, was chatting with a friend of their 15-year-old daughter, a young British girl growing up in America. She went on to respond to the criticism indirectly, specifically the claim that her Spanish accent has been inconsistent over the years.

“They say that it’s like communication. If you ever talk to a really old person who cannot hear, and I’m gonna emphasize, I’m gonna speak slower,” she explained to the teen. “And you’re not even really thinking about it. You just start to do it.”

She continued, “You know what it’s called? Code-switching. I had to learn about it because the whole world was mean to me.”

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Chatter surrounding Hilaria’s heritage emerged in December 2020, when social media users alleged that her Spanish roots were fabricated by pointing to the fact that she was born in Boston, Mass., with the birth name Hilary. In response, she doubled down on her origins, stating that she was raised in both Boston and Spain. Her accent has become less pronounced in the wake of the controversy, a change that Hilaria attributed to code-switching.

“Being in the spotlight, as people like to call it. People say, ‘Oh, don’t you get used to it?’ No, you don’t get used to it,” she said in the episode, during a solo confessional. “You never get used to people being mean. But you take a deep breath, and I think you learn to distance yourself from it, and so, you know, you just try turning down the volume in my head a bit… and I’m not gonna take it personally.”

Hilaia previously addressed the backlash in the premiere episode of the reality series, sharing, “I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me sad and it didn’t make me hurt and it didn’t put me in dark places. But my family, my friends, my community . . . speak multiple languages, have belonging in multiple places. We are a mix of all of these different things and that’s gonna have an impact on how we sound and how we articulate things. That’s normal. That’s called being human.”

Aside from the allegations of cultural appropriation aimed at Hilaria, the reality star and husband Alec have also been fending off backlash regarding his involvement in the deadly Rust tragedy, which saw the actor wield the gun that discharged the live round that killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and wounded director Joel Souza.

The Baldwins airs Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on TLC. Episodes are also available to stream on Max.