‘The Good Place’ creator Megan Amram faced intense backlash after racist and homophobic Tweets she wrote between 2011 and 2013 resurfaced online.
Among other things, she used a slur that compared Asians to people with down syndrome and said she would kill all gay people if she had a time machine.
William Jackson Harper, who played Chidi Anagonye in The Good Place, Tweeted on Friday that he had been “wrestling for a while with how to respond to Megan Amram’s tweets,” and that “we can’t tolerate those sorts of things being said about our Asian brothers and sisters, and in this moment, it’s my duty to be actively anti-racist, and I didn’t do that.”
Been wrestling for a while with how to respond to Megan Amram’s tweets. And I effed up. Those tweets shocked the hell out of me. I wanted to give her a chance to respond and apologize, but as I waited I realized that silence was complicity, whether I meant for it to be or not.
— William Jackson Harper (@dubjackharper) June 19, 2020
In contrast, Manny Jacinto, the Filipino-Canadian actor who played Jason Mendoza in The Good Place, posted that he was “shocked and deeply offended” by the Tweets, but that his personal relationship to Amram had been a positive one.
https://t.co/fpMhlYSsHl pic.twitter.com/cUhDcLT64c
— Manny Jacinto (@MannyJacinto) June 19, 2020
Amram posted a public apology last week.
“The bottom line is I tweeted some careless, hurtful things,” she wrote. “But I can’t. So instead, I have spent the last decade attempting to unlearn the complicit racism I participate in as a white person and becoming the vocally supportive ally I think I am now.”
To everyone that follows me, please read: pic.twitter.com/0Qne8M1wwN
— Megan Amram (@meganamram) June 18, 2020
Some people, however, were not so amused.
i think this apology falls short because you spend a lot of time talking about how you’ve changed but you haven’t actually named the thing you did. careless? hurtful? sure. but the jokes were also racist & ableist. say that.
— Franchesca Ramsey (@chescaleigh) June 18, 2020
racist people seem incapable of apologizing without telling you how incredible they are
— Scott Nibley (@noamisright) June 18, 2020
