Cross-posted at my blog:
Serena Williams on Wednesday offered a slightly new twist on the classic non-apology apology after she was quoted by Rolling Stone delivering shockingly insensitive remarks about the Steubenville rape case, in which a 16-year-old girl was raped by two high school football players. Here’s her full statement from today (emphasis added):
“What happened in Steubenville was a real shock for me. I was deeply saddened. For someone to be raped, and at only sixteen, is such a horrible tragedy! For both families involved – that of the rape victim and of the accused. I am currently reaching out to the girl’s family to let her know that I am deeply sorry for what was written in the Rolling Stone article. What was written – what I supposedly said – is insensitive and hurtful, and I by no means would say or insinuate that she was at all to blame.
“I have fought all of my career for women’s equality, women’s equal rights, respect in their fields – anything I could do to support women I have done. My prayers and support always goes out to the rape victim. In this case, most especially, to an innocent sixteen year old child.”
And here’s the original quote as published by Rolling Stone in its profile of Williams. You’ll see why it didn’t take a leap for many to read the remarks as a version of the “she was asking for it” defense. (To say nothing of the fact that Williams decided to discuss the teen’s virginity.):
“Do you think it was fair, what they got? They did something stupid, but I don’t know. I’m not blaming the girl, but if you’re a 16-year-old and you’re drunk like that, your parents should teach you—don’t take drinks from other people. She’s 16, why was she that drunk where she doesn’t remember? It could have been much worse. She’s lucky. Obviously I don’t know, maybe she wasn’t a virgin, but she shouldn’t have put herself in that position, unless they slipped her something, then that’s different.”
It’s best not to say something terrible in the first place. But when you do, it’s best to apologize for saying that terrible thing, rather than apologizing that it was printed in a magazine and then implying that you might not actually have said the terrible thing in the first place. Better still, just instruct your publicist to draft a compelling apology … unless this is what the publicist thought was a compelling apology, in which case fire your publicist.
HT: Ian McDonald.
Cross-posted at my blog:
In the wake of a controversy that erupted around an address by Center for Inquiry CEO Ron Lindsay designed to welcome participants to the Women in Secularism 2 conference last month, the CFI Board released a statement that reads, in part:
The Center for Inquiry, including its CEO, is dedicated to advancing the status of women and promoting women’s issues, and this was the motivation for its sponsorship of the two Women in Secularism conferences. The CFI Board wishes to express its unhappiness with the controversy surrounding the recent Women in Secularism Conference 2.
CFI believes in respectful debate and dialogue. We appreciate the many insights and varied opinions communicated to us. Going forward, we will endeavor to work with all elements of the secular movement to enhance our common values and strengthen our solidarity as we struggle together for full equality and respect for women around the world.
This is a terrible apology.
The Board doesn’t apologize to offended participants, who felt they were being lectured at by the CEO rather than welcomed by him and who then felt directly attacked by him, as when he directly attacked some of them in a blog post. (Lindsay’s own apology for that blog post is here.)
Instead, the Board chose to “express its unhappiness with the controversy” rather than with the way that its CEO handled his task of welcoming participants or engaging with them when they took to the internet to lament parts of his address that they felt were overtly critical of the role of feminism in secularism (as he suggested it was sometimes used to silence men).
It’s pretty much a guarantee that issuing a non-apology won’t achieve the result of bringing a month-old controvery under control; instead, it’s very likely to anger all the people who were offended in the first place.
HT: Olivia Hunt.
From President Obama’s speech on drones and national security today:
“It is a hard fact that U.S. strikes have resulted in civilian casualties, a risk that exists in all wars. For the families of those civilians, no words or legal construct can justify their loss. For me, and those in my chain of command, these deaths will haunt us as long as we live…
Let us remember that the terrorists we are after target civilians, and the death toll from their acts of terrorism against Muslims dwarfs any estimate of civilian casualties from drone strikes…”
He feels pretty bad about it, but really the terrorists should feel worse.
So, there’s that.
A Republican lawmaker from Arkansas upset both Bostonians and non-Bostonians from both sides of the aisle this morning after he felt the need to tweet a pro-gun message around the time two armed police officers were being shot in their pursuit of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects.
He later pulled the tweet and “apologized,” as seen above … though his apology is for timing rather than content (which, apparently, he thinks is still totally appropriate). He also included this observation:
“I don’t regret the content as much as I regret the timing,” Bell, R-Mena, told The Associated Press. “I really didn’t think about it going to Boston and was generally expressing my personal view of how I would have felt in that situation myself.”
[…]
“I was basically just expressing my frustration, I guess, if I had been a person who was living there last night and my elected officials had prevented me from being able to defend myself and my family,” Bell told the AP. “I would have felt pretty powerless and wanted to express that.”
A better apology would have been much shorter and to the point, “I am extremely sorry for expressing what can only be called a ghastly opinion at what can only be called the worst possible time. Next week, I’ll go back to expressing my various ghastly opinions and I’m pretty sure none of you will notice since you didn’t really seem to notice before.”
Conservative Radio Host Bob Davis, speaking about the Newtown families who he claimed were infringing on his gun rights. Matthew Keys notes that Davis later apologized for his remarks.
My own sense is that he didn’t actually apologize at all, though he expects people to take what he said as an apology. What he actually said was:
I do not hide behind flowery language I do not pull my punches ah, when I’m passionate about something it comes out on the air, it’s real and it will always be that way …. What I said Friday was an emotional predecessor to a thought which can and will find a more refined expression by me and others in the future, I guarantee you. But this isn’t a newspaper or a magazine and we don’t filter our views or commentary before we say it, it is radio, it’s immediate, it can be emotional both in its immediate expression as well as its response. It’s unrealistic, I think, to expect a compete filter for anybody doing live media …. Um, but there are those who would silence the opposition in their desire to have their way, majority rule not withstanding. We all have the right to express our opinions on any subject.
So, yeah, not an apology.
Instead, he made it seem like critics of his ridiculous and offensive remarks were attempting to stifle his freedom of speech, he promised his listeners that they’d continue to get the unvarnished “truth” from him in the future, and he made clear that he’ll continue to explore the idea that led him to want to tell the Newtown shooting victims and co-victims to “go to hell.”
New Hampshire state Rep. Peter Hansen referred to women as “vaginas” in an email to colleagues sent on the Legislature’s official internal listserv. In response to a message debating a “stand your ground” measure being considered by the State House, the Republican lawmaker wrote:
What could possibly be missing from those factual tales of successful retreat in VT, Germany, and the bowels of Amsterdam? Why children and vagina’s of course. While the tales relate the actions of a solitary male the outcome cannot relate to similar situations where children and women and mothers are the potential victims.Hansen initially remained defiant in response to criticism, explaining that he had a “fairly well educated mind” and did not need his colleagues to act as “self-appointed wardens” to his speech. He went on to suggest that anyone offended by his use of female genitalia to describe women everywhere should “re-examine [their] psyche.”
But his critics persisted and Hansen relented over his figure of speech, at least a little:
Cross posted at my blog.
County Commissioner Jim Gile of Saline County, Kansas, apologizing for using the term “n*gger-rigging.” Gile said he meant “jury-rigged.”
In his apology, “Gile said he also has a close friend whom he regards as a sister who is black,” the Salina Journal reported. “‘I don’t ever do anything bad and don’t know how to do anything bad. People know I am not,’ he said.”
That second part of the quote … well … it pretty much works to negate the first part of the quote.
But most importantly, from the perspective of those who care about terrible apologies, it’s noteworthy that Gile said in his apology that he meant to say “jury-rigged”: “I had it (jury-rigged) on my brain and this came out.” But when he was asked in the moment to repeat what he’d said, his reply was “Afro-Americanized.”
So, yeah, Gile was thinking something racist, then he said something really racist, and then he lied about what he meant to say when he “apologized.”
Rep. Don Young (R-AK) on Thursday night stood by his use of a racial slur to describe Latinos, saying that he “meant no disrespect” when he told an Alaska radio interviewer, “We used to hire 50 to 60 wetbacks to pick tomatoes”:
“During a sit down interview with Ketchikan Public Radio this week, I used a term that was commonly used during my days growing up on a farm in Central California,” Young said in the statement. “I know that this term is not used in the same way nowadays and I meant no disrespect.”
This is a terrible apology in no small part because it’s not an apology at all. It’s also a terrible apology because it doesn’t make any sense.
Young isn’t sorry for using a racial slur and disrespecting people. He’s not even sorry that people felt disrespected by what he regards as a simply miscommunication. He simply insists that everyone used the word “wetbacks” without any ill intent back when he was younger and, though it has apparently now become a racial slur, he didn’t mean it that way.
It’s hard to imagine how Young “meant no disrespect” if he knows “that this term is not used in the same way nowadays.” What’s more, the fact that the term was commonly used when he was younger in no way suggests that it was less disrespecful back then. It was equally disrespecful and people are less inclined to casually toss it around today than they were then because, generally, people want at the very least to seem more respectful of others than Young apparently does.
Shocked issued a statement saying that, when she said things like, “When they stop Prop 8 and force priests at gunpoint to marry gays, it will be the downfall of civilization, and Jesus will come back” and “God hates faggots,” she was saying that’s what people would say if they hated gay people, not thatshe hates gay people. Don’t “believe everything you read on Facebook or Twitter,” says Shocked.
For those with time on their hands and the stomach for such things, here’s the whole bizarre, rambling, born-again, bigoted speech that led to Shocked’s non-apology:
HT: Mike K.
“Our cover illustration last week got strong reactions, which we regret,” Josh Tyrangiel, the magazine’s editor, wrote in a statement sent to POLITICO. “Our intention was not to incite or offend. If we had to do it over again we’d do it differently.”
This one’s a particularly terrible apology.
First of all, there’s no apology; there’s simply a statement of regret. But the editor seems to suggest his regret is that the cover illustration “got strong reactions” rather than that the cover was overtly racist. And since he claims that the “intention was not to incite or offend,” he further implies that the strong reactions might have simply been the result of a misunderstanding, rather than the natural result of his decision to publish an offensive cover illustration.
Awful magazine cover, awful apology. Just awful.
HT: Drew Taub.
(Cross posted with my blog)
