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Bette Midler apologizes for tweeting ‘women are the n-word of the world’

Midler said she's actually an 'ally' to black women.

 

Audra Schroeder

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Posted on Oct 5, 2018   Updated on May 21, 2021, 4:53 am CDT

On Thursday night, many people discovered that Bette Midler trending on Twitter in October was unfortunately not Hocus Pocus-related.

Midler tweeted out “Women, are the n-word of the world,” and then went on to detail how women are silenced and disrespected. It’s a dated view on feminism, and to many, it was the epitome of white feminism in action.

 

After the pushback started, Midler tried to explain the quote—which is the title of a song from John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1972 album Some Time in New York City and was reportedly first coined by Ono in a 1969 magazine interview. Midler then doubled down on its perceived relevance, stating, “This is not about race, this is about the status of women.” That also didn’t help.

Midler eventually apologized, saying the “too brief investigation of allegations against Kavanaugh infuriated me” and that she “tweeted w/o thinking my choice of words would be enraging to black women who doubly suffer, both by being women and by being black.”

But people were not feeling her apology and her erasure of black women’s experience.

Midler landed in deleted-tweet-land in 2016 as well, when she made a transphobic joke about Caitlyn Jenner.

H/T Daily Mail 

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*First Published: Oct 5, 2018, 10:43 am CDT