Dutch magazine calls Rihanna a ‘niggabitch’
Not only did Dutch glossy Jackie totally mix up their cultural and racial slurs, they also failed to do their fact checking. Before I hack into the ‘N word’, the magazine said Rihanna was from Jamaica when in fact she’s from Barbados. But countries with a predominantly black population all look alike too, apparently. Tsss.
The article reads: The Niggabitch. She has street cred, a ghetto ass, and a golden voice. It goes on to call Rihanna ‘the ultimate niggabitch’.
My gripe about using this highly offensive and incorrect racial slur is that many Dutch people in the media have no clue what they are actually saying when they use English. They think they do, but they have no proper understanding of the context. And when confronted by natives like myself, they plead ignorance. How colonial.
If the Dutch found it offensive, imagine the buzz around the Internet at a time when anything remotely foreign looking is not very popular in Dutch society. And the piss poor excuse is typically Dutch in a bad way: they usually know exactly what they’re saying, but as soon as someone confronts them about it, they’ll tell you you’re too sensitive and that it wasn’t meant to be offensive. Case closed, it’s your problem. They’ll call that a ‘misunderstanding’, too.
In fact, ‘bitch’ is a nice thing to say sometimes in Dutch although it’s still offensive, just like women being called Radio Bitches. The Dutch context differs from the English context: swear words in a foreign language are never as bad as in your own. However, if you use English words, you will be judged according to how those words are used in that language, not your own, which is what happened here.
Part of the English apology goes, “It was naive to think that this was an acceptable form of slang — you hear it all the time on tv and radio, then your idea of what is normal apparently shifts — but it was especially misguided”. The fact that the magazine claims they didn’t know that calling Rihanna a ‘niggerbitch’ was a bad thing just shows that some Dutch journalists should not use English at all.
It’s like a small child running around with scissors.
UPDATE: Assuming that it is Rihanna twittering, read what she thought of the article.
BREAKING: Editor-in-Chief of Jackie Eva Hoeke has stepped down as a result of the commotion surrounding her bad choice of words.
(Link: theybf, Photo of Phone app by jpdefillippo138, some rights reserved)
Great article, I totally agree. It is a good that this becomes a big issue. I find it very irritating that people are trying to be popular and do not know what they are talking about. Jackie magazine is trying to be global but I am sure that they hardly travel nor having any cultural understandings.
It’s just so much harder to accept ignorance as an excuse, from a culture that is still majorly okay with blackface.
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