You turn on the television to watch Good Morning America with your morning coffee. Within a few minutes, you have to double-take, look at the calendar, and reaffirm that it is in fact 2016 and not 1961.
That’s what some people might have been thinking when on the morning of August 22nd, Monday, GMA co-anchor Amy Robach sat in her chair and delivered a racial slur to the masses–though now she’s taking it back, Variety reports.
In the middle of a story about Zendaya, the singer, Disney Channel star, and Twitter queen (all at the age of nineteen), taking on the role of Mary Jane Watson in the upcoming Spider-Man movie, Robach uttered a sentence that immediately enraged listeners.
Said the Good Morning America co-anchor, “We all know Hollywood has received recent and quite a bit of criticism for casting white actors in what one might assume should be a role reserved for colored people.”
Of course, the phrase that initially set people off was “colored people,” words that haven’t left the midcentury except through the lips of a racist family member. They were used to describe black people in a derogatory fashion that could be used in a more commonplace atmosphere, without being as extreme as possible. The words marked signs barring black men and women from using the same bathrooms, restaurants, and other public spaces, as well as they found a notch in laws that prohibited black people from having the same rights as their white counterparts.
On Twitter, people posted responses that ranged anywhere from annoyed to outraged.
Did she just say “color people” in regards to the Zendaya/Spider-Man story?!! @GMA