Two things I have really been looking forward to over the last few months are (1) Breaking Bad ending with Jesse Pinkman moving to Monaco and becoming an international playboy named Pierre Croissant (fingers crossed), and (2) the racist houseguests on this season’s Big Brother getting voted off the show and realizing that they’ve been fired from their day jobs and publicly shamed while they were sequestered in the house. Last night, about one half of one of those wishes came true.
Quick refresher: Aaryn Gries, pictured above, is a delightful young woman from Texas who did the following things during her time on the show: repeatedly called a gay castmate “a queer,” said “Be careful what you say in the dark, you might not be able to see the bitch” about a black castmate, said an Asian castmate should shut up and “go make some rice,” and did this impression of a sassy black woman, which was so stereotypical and offensive that she might as well have put shoe polish on her face first a la Roger Sterling.
All of which brings us to last night, when she got voted off the show and joined Julie Chen for her live exit interview. After Chen started to press her on some of the things she said and did, Aaryn appeared to place the blame on the show for taking her comments out of context to play LOL At The Racist Texan…
“Being Southern, it’s a stereotype,” Aaryn started. “If I have said some things that have been taken completely out of context and wrong…. I did not mean to ever come off racist.” Cue the first burst of in-studio guffaws. “That’s not me,” she continued, “and I apologize to anyone I’ve offended.”
… which is all well and good except for the part where she was living in a house that was filled with cameras that were recording her every move 24 hours a day, and everything she said was being viewed unedited, in context, on the show’s live feed. So…
That’s when Chen — noting that “everything they say, everything they do” gets broadcast live on Internet — rattled off a small sampling of the racist and homophobic comments Aaryn made on the live feed, including her telling Helen, who’s Asian, to “Shut up, go make some rice!”
“I do not remember saying those things,” she claimed, as more laughs erupted from the audience. “That was not meant to be serious. And if I said those things… I feel horrible. I don’t even know what else to say about that.”
Aaryn then did pretty much the only thing one can do when faced with ironclad proof and a hostile audience. She attempted a Hail Mary “Because Texas, y’all” defense.
“In Texas, we say things…. Sometimes we joke and we don’t mean it,” she offered. “I really feel bad that this is how it was being seen and how I’ve come across to people. I don’t want to seem like that person.”
So, yes. This was some pretty delicious comeuppance. The only downside of the whole thing — and the reason I said I only got half of my wish — is that Aaryn is now off to the show’s Jury House, which means Chen was still not able to inform her that she’s been fired from her job, or that she’s been vilified on the Internet for the entire summer. We’ll have to wait a little longer for that. But in the interim, this will do just fine.
(via TV Line)
