Katie Hopkins, a far-right commentator paid to produce Islamophobia-centric content for Rebel Media, addressed a Twitter user with a racial slur in a since-deleted tweet yesterday. Rebel Media did not respond to Right Wing Watch’s request for comment.
In the post yesterday, Hopkins referred to a person of color responding to her recent video work in Detroit, Michigan, who had blamed Hopkins’ generation for the economic scenario leading to deterioration of buildings in the city. The user had suggested to Hopkins that people who want to help Detroit should start with fixing up abandoned homes, to which Hopkins responded that she was in “complete agreement” with the user she called “Jigga-Boo.” Jigaboo, as defined by Merriam-Webster dictionary, is “disparaging,” “offensive” “slang” used to refer to a black person. Vox reports that the term “was used mostly during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in association with the mockery of stereotypical African-American physical features.”
Soon after posting, Hopkins deleted the tweet. But her post had already been saved in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine records.
Yesterday’s tweet is hardly Hopkins’ first run-in with racist rhetoric. Last year, she generated public outcry after she wrote, “Dear black people. If your lives matter why do you stab and shoot each other so much,” when sharing an advertisement for the Netflix TV series “Dear White People.” Hopkins was fired from hosting a weekend radio show last year after she called for the need of a “final solution,” a term used by Nazis to justify the Holocaust, after a terror attack in Manchester. Despite this, Hopkins was hired by Rebel Media, where she is now part of a far-right effort to disseminate white nationalist propaganda from South Africa, where she was detained for spreading racial hatred.
