Ellen DeGeneres deletes ‘meaningless’, tone deaf Black Lives Matter tweet after blistering backlash
Ellen DeGeneres broadcasting her chat show from home. (YouTube/The Ellen Show)
Ellen DeGeneres has deleted a tweet supporting US protests against police brutality after a blistering backlash.
Her tweet was a response to the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was killed by a white Minneapolis police officer on May 25.
The officer used his knee to pin Floyd to the ground by his neck until he went limp.
The 46-year-old, who was unarmed, can be heard a widely-shared video gasping “please, I can’t breathe”, and “don’t kill me”, before he passed away.
In the wake of his death, protests against ongoing police brutality have broken out across the US.
According to them, in the now-deleted tweet, DeGeneres wrote: “Like so many of you, I am angry and I am sad.
“People of colour in this country have faced injustice for far too long. For things to change, things must change.
“We must commit ourselves to this change with conviction and with love.”
For things to change, things must change. Brave.
— Roland Spaghetti (@rolandspaghetti) May 31, 2020
But the backlash soon followed as people branded her vague statement as hollow.
Firstly, DeGeneres failed to mention Black people, who are the main targets of police brutality.
The talk show host was also slammed for her self-described “friendship” with former Republican president George Bush, and urged to donate some of her multi-million dollar fortune to Black causes.
One Twitter user wrote: “As an Asian-American, a POC, I still have more privilege than Black women and men. This statement is meaningless and a back door to All Lives Matter.
“For things to change, we must first acknowledge specifically that Black Lives Matter.”
As an Asian-American, a POC, I still have more privilege than Black women and men. This statement is meaningless and a back door to All Lives Matter. For things to change, we must first acknowledge specifically that #BlackLivesMatter.— Lacey Vorrasi-Banis (@LaceyBanis) May 31, 2020
1) it’s black people 2) it’s not love if you just mean “sweetly imploring oppressed people to stop damaging property 3) donate more money. you’re mates with war criminals.— beth mccoll (@imteddybless) May 31, 2020
Say black people Ellen— A. (@sofiarahim) May 31, 2020
Another simply wrote: “Say Black people Ellen.”
Ellen DeGeneres has been battling controversy after claims that she is ‘one of the meanest people alive’.
In March, comic Kevin Porter described Ellen DeGeneres as “one of the meanest people alive”, and then encouraged Twitter users to share their “insane stories” about DeGeneres’s, pledging to match each one with a $2 donation to LA Food Bank.
The damning thread contained hundreds of unverified stories of the daytime talk show host’s behaviour claimed by apparent ex-employees as well as Los Angeles locals, seemingly at odds with her hyper-positive and generous reputation.
Less than two weeks later, things went from bad to worse when DeGeneres opened her first quarantine episode of The Ellen Show from home with a tone deaf joke about being queer in jail.
She said, from her $27 million mansion: “This is like being in jail, is what it is. It’s mostly because I’ve been wearing the same clothes for ten days and everyone in here is gay.”
This month, a bodyguard assigned to protect DeGeneres at the 2014 Oscars claimed that her famously friendly demeanour is nothing but “false facade and bravado”.
