Gina Rodriguez Is Sorry If Saying the N-Word Offended You
Whomst gives you heebie-jeebies??Gina Rodriguez is sorry she recorded a video of herself rapping the N-word and then posted it on Instagram Stories for three hours before deleting it. No, it wasn’t even an Instagram Live slipup. Rodriguez shared a video of herself rapping along to the Fugees song “Ready or Not.” Specifically, she nods her head for a bit, then says the Lauryn Hill lyric “N----s give me heebie-jeebies” (the full bar is “Frontin’ n----s give me heebie-jeebies,” but Rodriguez skips the first part, eager to get to the next). The word appears only once in the three-minutes- and-47-seconds-long song, yet it’s the sole focus of the video.
Gina Rodriguez is trending on Twitter after rapping the n-word in a now-deleted Instagram story. pic.twitter.com/5MWvkjDu1L
— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) October 15, 2019Rodriguez didn’t delete the post for over three hours, then posted a video apologizing just in case it offended anybody. “I just wanted to reach out and apologize,” she said. “I am sorry. I am sorry if I offended anyone by singing along to the Fugees, to a song I love, that I grew up on. I love Lauryn Hill and I really am sorry if I offended you.” She doesn’t mention the word specifically, and she doesn’t directly address black people.
This video comes a few months after Rodriguez had a similar reaction to being called anti-black earlier in 2019. The Jane the Virgin actress interrupted Yara Shahidi during an interview last year to say the 19-year-old is an inspiration to “all women,” not just black women; she incorrectly said Latinas get paid less than black women in the entertainment industry; and she cried when she received pushback, citing her Afro-Latinx extended family. “So to get anti-black is saying that I’m anti-family,” she said on “Sway in the Morning” this January. “My father is dark-skinned, he’s Afro-Latino … If anything, the black community is my community.”
Update, October 16, 8:55 a.m.: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the stage, the Notes App! Because a video apology just doesn’t have the same gravitas as an iPhone screenshot, Gina Rodriguez posted another apology, this time onto her feed. “Whatever consequences I face for my actions today, none will be more hurtful than the personal remorse I feel,” she wrote. “Watching my own video playing back at me, has shaken me to my core.” The actress concluded with “I have some serious learning and growing to do and I am so deeply sorry for the pain I have caused.”
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