Hello, Daily Beast! We of the Internetz have short memories. Yet we of SorryWatch would like everyone to NEVER FORGET how terrible your recent apology for your life-threatening homophobic clickbait-y idiocy was. Now we will point you to another web site that issued an apology for displaying privileged cluelessness, and did so much, much better than you did.

Take a picture, Daily Beast, it’ll last longer. Sit down. Have a snack.

On Tuesday, Autostraddle ran a review of the sophisticated drawing-room comedy Sausage Party. A freelance critic pitched the site, which focuses on lesbian and bisexual women’s issues, a feature that approvingly discussed Salma Hayek’s portrayal of a queer Latina taco.

sexy bisexual taco, Salma Hayek 

The piece did not go over well. As Senior Editor Heather Hogan said in a note entitled “We Messed Up,” 

After we published the review, we heard from Latinx readers who believe the portrayal of Salma Hayek’s taco was racist and that it reinforced harmful stereotypes. We heard from readers who were upset that we labeled the taco a lesbian when it seems more likely that she was bisexual. We heard from readers who questioned the consent of the sexual encounter between the taco and the hot dog bun. We heard from readers who found the taco to be a damaging portrayal of a predatory queer woman.

Yikes! (For all our readers who may be saying, “Jeez, it’s just a cartoon,” yes, and Maus is just a comic book. Cartoons can be serious business. Also funny. Comedy can address deep truths. And also be funny. Cuteness can be a Trojan horse. And expectations are there for the subverting.)

Autostraddle took down the review (there was no attempt to rewrite it and excuse it, in the way of The Daily Beast) and published a three-section replacement essay: “How The Review Came To Be Published,” “Why The Review Was Unacceptable” and “What We’re Doing To Stop Mistakes Like This From Happening.”

You should read it all, here.

The explanation offers full transparency. It shows the text of an entertaining Slack conversation among the site’s senior editors, opened by Hogan, in which she expresses reservations about the review before posting it. Senior Editor Yvonne Marquez offers to give the review a second read. Marquez reports then back that the piece is “fine” and notes “it’s not like we’re endorsing this movie, just pointing out there’s a lesbian taco.” She also notes that the movie is “crass,” and says that “people in our community can critique the hell out of it and pick it apart…because it’s meant for stupid fucking men.”

In the second section of the editor’s note, Hogan says that Autostraddle should not have assigned a non-Latina writer to write about a caricature of a Latina, because “by praising the film as a positive portrayal of a queer Latina, we allowed a white writer to, in effect, condone the stereotyping.” She also says she shouldn’t have put her colleague Yvonne in the position “of being the conscience and voice for all queer Latina women.” She lists a variety of additional problems and concerns (again, go read this model apology yourself, but here’s a taste):

I want to personally apologize to every reader who was hurt by the Sausage Party review. I failed you as a senior editor of this website and I failed you as an ally. I am wholly sorry for the pain and anger I caused you. I offer you no justification. I was blinded by my own whiteness existing inside a system of white supremacy. I must do better. I will do better. I also want to take full responsibility for not working more closely with the freelancer. This was not her fault. This was an editorial failure. I should have asked more critical questions about the film, especially since no one I know had seen it.

(Again, I hear some of you saying this is OMG Y SO SERIOUS LIGHTEN UP JEEZ. And yes, it is funny to parse the meaning of a taco! Sometimes a taco is just a taco! However, in this case, when a lot of women from the taco-symbolic community have issues with the representation of said spicy stereotype-trafficking anthropomorphic taco, maybe we should listen rather than mocking them?)

In the final section, Hogan talks about how Autostraddle will prevent problems like this from recurring. She notes that since she was accepted into the Television Critics Association this year, they’ll have earlier, free access to tv shows. She talks about how they’ve tried to give women of color the most prominent voices in reviewing Orange is the New Black, a show with many characters of color. She notes that because her staff had early access to the show, they could be more proactive in assigning reviewers (for instance, when a shocking, controversial plot point focused on a character of color, she pulled a white recapper off the episode and assigned it to a critic of color). She talks about a new Diversity Initiative at the site, with a plan to give writers of color more support.

There is still a bit of defensiveness in the note. Hogan notes that her site, “like most online media for LGBTQ folks” is mostly staffed by white people. It’s not an excuse. Explaining how not having screeners has an impact on the site’s writing is valid — it’s good for readers to know how the sausage [sic] is made — but Hogan gives it too much weight in this particular debacle. You don’t have to see the movie to know that a heavily accented lesbian taco lusting after a straight white hot dog bun named Brenda is going to be…problematic. Hogan notes that they didn’t go to the writer with their concerns because she was only a freelancer — unspoken is “we don’t pay her enough to deal with repeated editorial questions” or “we don’t trust her enough to answer our questions, but she’s the only person we know who’s seen the movie and she came to us so we’re stuck.” Hogan should have been explicit in connecting these dots, and should explain where the money is going to come from to increase the site’s field of writers of color. (Also, if Autostraddle can’t hire more editors of color, because the money isn’t there, say that explicitly and say how you’re going to try to change this. Staff editors have a lot more systemic impact than individual freelance writers.)

And a note from your editrix Snarly, as a journalist: I wish you hadn’t taken the piece down. As we know from The Daily Beast’s debacle, nothing is truly gone on the Internet. Still, deleting your mistake isn’t fully owning your mistake. There should be an institutional record. It’s important that we’re able to go back and see the sexism, racism and homophobia that has marred the history of reporting in this country. (I recently saw an exhibit on the Leo Frank lynching case; the newspaper clippings were…something else.) If we make things disappear, future generations can’t learn. (I agree that The Daily Beast should have taken theirs down, though, since it both outed and essentially called for the hurting of specific human beings.)

All that said: This is a very good apology, one that other media outlets (cough, cough) might look to for inspiration. What say, Beasties?