On Gina Rodriguez’s use of the “N-word”

On Tuesday, October 15, actress Gina Rodriguez posted a video to her Instagram story of her rapping to the song “Ready or Not” by the Fugees. She raps the lyrics, which include the N-word, directly into the camera, renewing a longstanding debate about who can and who cannot use the word by doing so. 

At the crux of the debate over who has the right to say the N-word without consequence is the question of ownership. When Gina Rodriguez, or anybody outside of the black community, stakes a public claim over the word, and the culture it belongs to, they rightfully court pushback from that community. And that’s exactly what happened here. The video remained on Rodriguez’s Instagram story for three hours before she took it down and issued an apology. 

“I am sorry if I offended anyone by singing along to the Fugees, to a song I love, I grew up on. I love Lauryn Hill, and I really am sorry if I offended you,” Rodriguez stated in a video released later that day. 

Rodriguez’s apology didn’t land, though, because she failed to address what actually upset people: her decision to rap along to, record, and post that specific part of the song as opposed to any other she could have used to show her affinity for the rap group. It’s unclear whether the actress’s apology was intentionally obtuse, or if she earnestly misunderstood the source of people’s outrage, but she ended up apologizing a second time.

The very next day, Rodriguez published a post on her Instagram that read, “The word I sang, carries with it a legacy of hurt and pain that I cannot even imagine. Whatever consequences I face for my actions today, none will be more hurtful than the personal remorse I feel.” She added, “Watching my own video playing back at me has shaken me to my core. It is humiliating that this has to be a public lesson but it is indeed a much deserved lesson.” 

This adequate apology almost ended before Rodriguez succumbed to another misstep, further cementing the misunderstanding of her transgressions. 

“I feel so deeply protective and responsible for the community of color but I have let this community down. I have some serious learning and growing to do and I am so deeply sorry for the pain I have caused.” 

Rodriguez didn’t let down people of color. She offended black people by using a slur that directly targets black people and which now belongs to them. Her use of the term “community of color” assumes that the N-word belongs to other communities aside from the black community, and her inability to understand that it does not is frustrating. 

This incident isn’t the actress’s first public episode of racial insensitivity toward the black community. In 2018, during a joint interview alongside Grown-ish star Yara Shahidi, the interviewer told Shahidi that she was “just goals for so many young black women.” Rodriguez interjected, seemingly correcting the interviewer by stating, “for so many women. Women.” Her reflexive reaction erased the specificity of black women in a similar spirit to those who cry “All Lives Matter” in response to “Black Lives Matter.” 

That same year, Rodriguez was part of a roundtable discussion about diversity and equitable pay in Hollywood. She claimed that black and Asian actresses were paid more than Latina actresses, which some interpreted as her dismissing the shared problems of actresses of color. Shortly thereafter Rodriguez went on the radio show Sway in the Morning and tearfully described her devastation in the wake of backlash to her comment. Instead of apologizing, though, she spoke about her “dark-skinned” father as if to say that her lineage negates her ability to be anti-black. 

The problem here is not just that Rodriguez seems to keep publicly struggling with anti-black racism, but also the continued inadequacy of her apologies. She rarely owns up to her mistakes, instead trying to grant herself some kind of membership in or affiliation to the group she offended, as a way to absolve any damage. 

This approach, of course, is not unique to Rodriguez, but speaks to a larger issue of racial insensitivity in our society. Rodriguez and those like her struggle to hear criticism directed at them in situations of cultural infringement because they believe they have some claim to that culture; they believe they can’t do any wrong to a group if they belong to it. When one actually apologizes for infringing upon or otherwise insulting a community, they must relinquish any agency they assumed they had in that culture. They must recognize that they are not a part of that culture and as such must heed the concerns of the members of that group. At the end of the day it’s about putting one’s own identity aside and listening to others 

The discourse around Rodriguez’s latest gaffe shouldn’t be about who can say what, therefore, but about who we should listen to in response to controversies over those words. Namely, we have to recognize who has cultural ownership and defer to them.