Blake Lively quotes Sir Mix-a-Lot, causing people’s heads to explode

Cover up your early-pregnancy baby body and you're keeping a secret; acknowledge those curves on social media and you're -- racist? Maybe, maybe not.

Blake Lively's curves are kickin', as she pointed out Wednesday on Instagram when she slapped the caption "L.A. face with an Oakland booty" on front and back views of herself arriving at the May 11 premiere and opening night gala for "Cafe Society" at the Cannes Film Festival. In response, people on social media had things of their own to point out.

There's no practical way to quantify how many comments it took to inspire the "Blake Lively accused of racism" headlines that began popping up after she posted, but the actress, 28, didn't acknowledge the supposed hubbub and left the image up on her page.

By Thursday, the Instagram comments and Twitter mentions were overwhelmingly supportive, with some people questioning how anyone could interpret the "Baby Got Back" lyric reference as racist and others declaring there were bigger fish to fry when it came to racial politics.

Maybe people just didn't get it? Lively was born in 1987. Sir Mix-a-Lot released "Baby Got Back" in 1992, along with its banned-by-MTV music video, which features booty-shaking dancers and the rapper performing on top of massive yellow buttocks. Meanwhile, Instagram has been around only since 2010, Twitter since 2006, and yes, MTV used to play music videos. 

For some, the issue was not racism but rather cultural appropriation, which celebrities including Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus and Pharrell have been accused of. Others said they didn't remember the fundamentals behind "Baby Got Back" pertaining exclusively to women of color.

Khloe Kardashian did something similar to Lively's post in August 2015, putting the same caption on a shot of her backside taken while out on a Chipotle run with then-boyfriend James Harden. Commenters that time around seemed less obsessed with the socio-political ramifications of her caption and more fixated on whether Kardashian's butt was in fact real.

"Pop culture says that if a black girl is to be taken seriously, she has to assimilate and be as white as possible, to the point of bleaching her hair blonde. But the entire point of the song was the opposite," Sir Mix-a-Lot, real name Anthony Ray, told Vulture in 2013 in an oral history about the song he didn't think would be a hit. It wound up being 1992's No. 2 seller, behind "I Will Always Love You" by Whitney Houston.

"For the casting of all the dancers, Mix and his friends wanted to have butt approval," the video's director, Adam Bernstein, told Vulture. "So the dancers would come in for the audition, and I had to snap a Polaroid of their butts. I was mortified: 'OK, now I have to take a close-up picture of your buttocks.' But a lot of the women auditioning thought it was hilarious. We took all the Polaroids, and made a giant grid of the buttocks, which we Fed-Exed to Seattle so that Mix and his friends could approve the butts."

Lively probably wouldn't have made it through the door of the casting office. For the record, the actress, who is expecting her second baby with Ryan Reynolds, actually doesn't pack much back when she's not pregnant.

Lively's rep did not respond to a request for comment.

Follow Christie D'Zurilla on Twitter @theCDZ.

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