Erica Mena has landed herself in hot water and is receiving great backlash from netizens. Erica Mena, who used to be in music videos and a cast member of the TV series “Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta,” was removed from the show due to her use of a derogatory term towards her Black co-star.
Mena will not be returning for the upcoming season of “Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta.” We received this information through a message the Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta shared on X.
Additionally, they mentioned that we will witness the impact of her hurtful words in the remaining three episodes of the current season.
Mena, one of the co-stars on MTV show, stirred up problems on the set when she used a derogatory term towards her co-star Spice, a renowned singer hailed as the “Queen of Dancehall.”
She called the star “monkey”. The racial slur she used has historically been employed to harm Black individuals in various contexts, including sports, educational institutions, and politics.
Erica Mena landed in a controversy
In a video from the 11th season of the show, Mena, who has Puerto Rican and Dominican descendants and was once married to Safaree Samuels, who is Black, got into a heated argument with Spice, a co-star with blue hair. During the argument, Mena flipped a table onto Spice and called her a “blue monkey” before the show’s producers separated them.
In a video on Facebook Live after the incident, Spice said that Mena was saying bad things about her when she was not around and called Mena fake.
Mena has faced prior controversies for consistently referring to someone from “Love & Hip Hop: New York” named Jhonni Blaze as a “monkey.” Additionally, back in 2015, she was accused of using offensive language like “Black Monkey” to describe a group of event organizers.
Love & Hip Hop: New York debuted in 2011 as a TV series that chronicles the lives of hip-hop and R&B artists, managers, and music producers, both in their careers and personal lives.
Following its initial success, the show spawned spin-offs in various locations, such as Atlanta, Hollywood, and Miami. It also played a significant role in elevating the fame of certain artists, including Cardi B and K. Michelle.
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Who is Erica Mena?
Mena first became well-known as a model when she was just 16 years old, participating in a competition on MTV that was all about looking like Jennifer Lopez. After that, she became a model in hip-hop music videos for artists like Young Gunz, 50 Cents, Chris Brown, and Akon.
Mena got a great break by starting to appear on reality TV shows, like the ‘Keeping Up with the Kardashian spin-off called ‘Kourtney & Khloe Take Miami,’ and later on ‘Love & Hip Hop: New York.’
She also had two kids with Samuels, whom she married in 2019 but later divorced in May 2021. This happened shortly after she announced that she was going to have her second child with Samuels.
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Racial slurs against Black people have been a critical issue
Using the word “monkey” to hurt Black people’s feelings has been going on for a very long time, over a hundred years. Recently, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) said that it is not okay to use this word in different situations.
They said this when a Black student in California was treated badly by someone from another school who made ape noises at them during a sports event.
They also talked about how, in Dr. Seuss’s comics, Black people were shown as being less important than White people or even as monkeys and cannibals (people who eat other people), which is mean.
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