Ellen the racist

A few months ago, Ellen Degeneres came under fire because of the allegations from ten employees and former employees that her show fosters a toxic workplace. The workplace was put under internal investigation, on counts of intimidation, bullying, mistreatment and racism, and amidst all this Ellen issued an apology which read, “ I learned that things happen here that never should have happened. I take that very seriously. And I want to say, I am so sorry to the people who were affected. I know that I’m in a position of privilege and power. And I realized that with that comes responsibility, and I take responsibility for what happens at my show.” I wouldn’t argue that Ellen was aware of the mistreatment that was happening behind the scenes, but I believe that Ellen sets the precedence for this behaviour through the way she acts on her show when interacting with guests.

I think Ellen is racist, and it’s fine if other people don’t, but I think she is, and she gets away with it because she wraps her racist remarks and behaviours up as jokes, and apparently if you get offended you’re just too sensitive, or you’re just completely misinterpreting Ellen. But she genuinely does make racist ‘jokes,’ and she’ll even repeat them, say in the case of her interactions with Sofia Vergara. Almost every time Sofia Vergara has been on Ellen’s show, Ellen has made fun of her accent or the way she says certain words. Mocking a person’s accent is both offensive and racist, and perpetuates negative stereotypes, but because Ellen makes these comments under the guise of telling a joke, it just gets laughed off. In the initial visits that Vergara made to the show, Ellen had made remarks like, “I shouldn’t judge because I think it would be hard to learn a new language entirely… but can you get rid of the accent?” Then in a later episode, Ellen told Vergara that her English has gotten worse with time, rather than better, and questioned whether Vergara is even fluent in English. In another episode Ellen teaches Vergara an ‘English word of the day,’ but Vergara is fluent in English and it’s just another opportunity for Ellen to make fun of Vergara’s accent.

In interactions with translators that she has on the show translating for guests who don’t speak English, she is often making fun of them or snapping at them. In one instance when she had a young guitar player on the show as a guest who didn’t speak English, she had a translator with him who didn’t seem to be older than a teenager. At one point when the translator translated a question into Mandarin for the boy to answer, Ellen snapped at her that she was taking too long, and that she had only asked one question, like she feared the translator was saying something else to the guest. Soon after when the translator didn’t know the answer to a question Ellen snapped at her again. Other times Ellen has interrupted translators speaking to guests or telling Ellen what guests were saying, just to make jokes about not understanding, or to make fun of how the language sounds. She’ll watch a guest speaking in another language with a patronising look on her face, like they sound stupid or that the language sounds foreign and weird to her. Sometimes when guests try to teach her how to say their names or phrases like “hello” and “thank you” she completely butches them for comedic purposes, she doesn’t even try to say it right.

In the end you can argue that Ellen is just making a joke, that she’s harmless, but she isn’t. If the entire message of the Ellen Show is to “be kind,” then what kind of message is she spreading to her viewers if she constantly subjects her guests to racist micro-aggressions. By saying ‘it’s just a joke’ she’s normalising racist behaviour, she’s saying that people deserve to be made fun of for having an accent or for speaking a language other than English.