Hollywood isn’t short on celebrities who have found themselves in a spot of bother after saying something offensive or tone-deaf. The latest to head up that list is none other than Jane the Virgin star Gina Rodriguez, who thought it was a good idea to casually drop the N-word on Instagram.
The actress shared a video of herself rapping along to the Fugees song ‘Ready or Not,’ which contains the lyric, “n***** give me heebie-jeebies,” and clearly thought it was fine to say the N-word without any repercussions.
As it turns out, the backlash was as swift as it was unrelenting and she quickly deleted the video. But the internet being what it is, some folk managed to keep a copy of Gina’s receipts.
Okay, it’s never okay to say the N-word in any circumstance (unless you’re black) regardless of whether you’re Gina Rodriguez or whoever but at least this is just the first time she’s – *checks notes* – oh wait, this is definitely not the first time Gina’s gotten in trouble with the black community for saying something tone-deaf.
There was that time when Gina interrupted an interviewer who said Yara Shahidi is an inspiration to black women and attempted to correct him by saying Shahidi is actually an inspiration to “women” in general, resulting in a wave of claims that she’s erasing black women.
Then there were those times when Gina copped a bunch of flak for clumsily trying to address racial inequality in Hollywood by erroneously claiming that black women get paid more than Latinas in the entertainment industry and are therefore part of the whole pay gap problem.
When she was rightfully called out on her well-intentioned but tone-deaf comments, Gina turned on the waterworks and tried to play the “my dad is Afro-Latino and my extended family has ties to the black community card” to unsurprisingly mixed results.
You would’ve think Gina would’ve learned something about not putting her foot in her mouth after her history of unsavoury comments but if her apology for the N-word video is anything to go by, it appears she’s learned a whole heap of nothing.
In a follow-up apology video that’s dripping with passive-aggressiveness, Gina says she’s sorry if she “offended anyone by singing along to The Fugees, to a song [she] love, that [she] grew up on—[she loves] Lauryn Hill—and, [she’s] really am sorry if [she] offended you.”
So not only is Gina clearly still not getting why her comments a problematic but it seems like she thinks singing the N-word is perfectly fine because it’s a song she loves and grew up with. Well okay then.
It almost feels like Gina Rodriguez has been taking PR lessons from Scarlett Johansson, which would explain a lot about the Jane the Virgin star’s faux pas actually.