A cast member on the new season of “Big Brother” has been fired from her job as pageant coordinator for East Coast USA Pageant, Inc. after cameras caught her using racial slurs–including the “N” word–and exhibiting behavior that the company deemed “shocking”.
Ginamarie Zimmerman and her housemates have gotten themselves into trouble with their onscreen antics of use of horrifyingly racist language–another woman tells an Asian contestant to “shut up and go make some rice”–and are now paying the price.
“The East Coast USA Pageant is an outlet for girls and women to gain self-confidence announce their platform and most importantly celebrate who they are. We believe and teach our contestants that beauty comes from within. We celebrate the diversity of our participants as all ethnicities are beautiful. We have never known this side of Ginamarie or have ever witnessed such acts of racism in the past,” Lauren Handler, the National Director and CEO East Coast USA Pageant, said in a statement. “We are actually thankful that this show let us see Ginamarie for who she truly is as we would never want her to be a role model to our future contestants. It is unfortunate that her hateful words were able to be witnessed by so many thousands of Big Brother fans as they were rightfully so deeply offended. We are unable to contact her at this time but when she returns from the Big Brother house we will be terminating her employment for her unforgivable behavior. In a business where we are surrounded by beauty every day we are saddened to see something so ugly come from someone we put on a very high pedestal.”
Sadly, the latest group of “Big Brother” contestants aren’t the first ones to use offensive language; back in 2008, Adam Jasinski was fired from his job with the United Autism Foundation after he called autistic children “retards”. CBS has released a statement on the behavior of their cast members, saying:
“Big Brother is a reality show about watching a group of people who have no privacy 24/7—and seeing every moment of their lives. At times, the houseguests reveal prejudices and other beliefs that we do not condone.”