Penn Badgley’s Tweet About Gossip Girl & White Privilege Will Make You Say “Huh?”

Penn Badgley starred as Dan "Lonely Boy" Humphrey for six seasons on The CW's one and only source on the scandalous lives of Manhattan's elite, Gossip Girl. At the end of the series, it also turned out that Gossip Girl was more than happy to tell that one secret the opening voiceover swore it would never reveal: her identity. Dan Humphrey was Gossip Girl. It made zero sense, but again, this is a show that could best be classified as a party procedural. Instead of solving a weekly murder mystery, all of the characters would come together in the third or fourth act for a fête of some sort. Grounded in reality it was not — at least for the 99%. It turns out that Penn Badgley knows exactly how ridiculous the show was. He just has a very confusing way of expressing it. Yesterday, he sent out this most head-scratching of tweets about how he thinks the Gossip Girl DVD cover conveys white privilege through the way the characters are casually strewn atop the Manhattan skyline. 

Is this an image of white privilege, or just a particularly on-the-nose DVD cover? Do Upper East Siders even have plebeian furniture like futons? That's a secret I'll never tell. XOXO.