After former The Bachelor contestant and current Channel 7 reporter Georgia Love (pictured above) was criticised for an Instagram story she posted, MasterChef star Melissa Leong has joined the conversation.
Love’s post, which featured a picture of a cat sat inside the window of a dumpling restaurant, was captioned ‘shop attendant or lunch?!’ with emojis. It has been widely criticised for depicting anti-Asian stereotypes.
It was then shared by popular Instagram acount @aussieinfluenceropinions, who wrote, “as well as ‘casual’ racism being totally not okay, did Georgia not take into consideration about how this could make her audience with an Asian background feel? Ugh.”
Love then posted a second Instagram story apologising, writing that she meant “no insinuation about the type of animal nor the type of restaurant, but I do see that my post did not come across like that and was offensive. I sincerely apologise for the oversight and offence I have causes. Thank you to those who called me out.”
After this apology, @aussieinfluenceropinions shared a second, older (now-deleted) post from Love depicting the same anti-Asian racist stereotype. The post was a meme of a restaurant called China Chef next to an animal hospital, and a cartoon dog with the text ‘that’s suspicious…’ above it.
Love had posted the meme with the caption “Best.”.
Commentators have pointed out that this indicates Love was likely aware of the anti-Asian connotations of her Instagram story.
Georgia Love posted this in 2013 with the caption ‘Best’. Yesterday, she posted a video of a Chinese restaurant with a cat in the window captioned, ‘Shop attendant or menu item? 😂’
She expects us to believe there was no racial component behind the “joke”. Hmm, nah, sorry. pic.twitter.com/sZtGuZz72s
— Tarang / तरंग (he/him) (@tarang_chawla) September 7, 2021
The Aussie Influencer Opinions page wrote, “she totally knew what she was doing. Not letting this one go. EDIT: she deleted this original post roughly 5 minutes after I shared to my story.”
While Love has yet to speak out about this second post, she has deleted her Twitter account.
Melissa Leong, food writer and host of MasterChef, who is Singaporean-Australian, has now spoken about Love’s post openly on her own Instagram.
In an Instagram Story, Leong wrote: “‘Shop attended or lunch?”, posted on a video of a cat in a Chinese restaurant by someone I know, who also happens to carry a fair amout of influence.”
“Casual racism from nice people is possibly the most betraying and insideous kind.”
“Not angry, just completely bummed that this video exists and that it isn’t the first joke of this kind made by here. Georgia, I really hope your remorse is real and that you grow in the right direction, because this stuff hurts more people, more than you think.”
“We must be allies for each other for a better world for all.”
Seven has yet to respond to requests for comment on the incident.
