John Roderick, a musician, podcaster and vocalist for The Long Winters, nicknamed “Bean Dad” after a Twitter thread about his daughter struggling to use a can opener went viral, apologized on Tuesday on his website. .
In the topic, Roderick said he let his daughter struggle for hours to open a can of beans without help, just giving her vague tips as she tried to learn for herself how to use an opener.
After his topic went viral, Roderick initially insulted critics who suggested he was being a bad father.
But as scrutiny intensified and the old racist and anti-Semitic tweets resurfaced, Roderick deactivated his Twitter account. He did it “in a panic,” he wrote at the beginning of the apology.
“I had to reflect on what I had done and the pain I caused, and my mind was clouded by an unprecedented flow of new information,” wrote Roderick. “I want to acknowledge and repair the injuries I have caused. I have many things to atone for. The insensitivity of my fatherhood story and the legacy of offensive language in my past are profound failures. I want to face them directly.”
On the topic, Roderick said he suggested that his 9-year-old daughter make beans after ordering lunch. When she said he didn’t know how to open the can, he begged her to find out for herself, instead of showing him how to use the can opener. He called it a teachable moment.
But to the dismay of readers, Roderick went on to describe his daughter struggling with the opener for hours, despite being angry and hungry. In the end, after six hours, he said that his daughter finally opened the can.
“Bean Dad” became the trend on Twitter on Sunday – the day after the topic was posted – while people criticized Roderick for starving his daughter for hours and saying that all he taught her was that she couldn’t ask responses to the father.
“My story about my daughter and the can of beans was poorly told. I didn’t tell how much we were laughing, how we had a bowl of pistachio between us all day while we worked on the problem, or that we both had a full breakfast a few hours before, “wrote Roderick in his apology. “Her mom stayed in the room with us all day and alternately laughing at us and telling us to be quiet while she worked on her laptop.”
Some compared the line to abuse they suffered as children at the hands of their parents, while others still feared that Roderick might be preparing his daughter for a difficult relationship with food.
“I was ignorant, insensitive to the message that my ‘pedantic father’ comic personality was indistinguishable from how abusive parents act, speak and think,” he wrote. “… I reread the story and I saw clearly that I framed it so badly, so insensitively. Papa Feijão, full of bragging and bragging, was hurting people. I conjured up an abusive father that many people actually recognized as life.”
He said that he would like abusive parents not to exist and that no one should be raised by a person who “tortured them physically or emotionally”.
“I am deeply sorry to have precipitated more hurt in the world, to prolong or exacerbate this by reacting and being irreverent when confronted and to take my Twitter feed offline yesterday instead of facing the music,” he wrote.
“As for the many racist, anti-Semitic, offensive and slanderous tweets from my early days on Twitter, I can only say this: all these tweets were intended to be ironic, sarcastic,” wrote Roderick. He added that he felt that being an ally of marginalized communities meant “taking the insults of the oppressors and launching them to mock racism, sexism, homophobia and intolerance”.
Roderick wrote that he was humbled by “my incredibly insensitive use of the language of sexual assault in casual play. It was a lazy and damaging ideology, which I continued to believe well beyond the point that I should have known it because I was a modern intellectual from a diverse community, I was it’s fine for me to play and slander in that context. It wasn’t. “
Following the topic, the podcast “My brother, my brother and me” announced that it would no longer use Roderick’s music as a theme, as it had done for almost a decade. “Danger!” Star Ken Jennings, who hosts the “Omnibus” podcast with Roderick, was also drawn into the controversy when he tried to defend his co-host.
In response to a tweet asking about Roderick’s anti-Semitic comments, Jennings tweeted, “If we’re looking for words in old tweets right now, it’s very easy to find out what he really thinks about anti-Semitism. In our program, he’s always the professional -Israel one! “
Jennings also said that she envied that Roderick’s “Bean Dad” became a dictionary entry and that he didn’t reach the same height.
“If it reassures anyone, I personally know that John is (a) a loving and caring father who (b) tells intense stories to the effect on his own irascibility at about ten podcasts a week. This site is so stupid,” he tweeted.
Many responded to Jennings’ tweets with disappointment, with one person calling it’s the “worst possible answer to that”. This answer has accumulated almost 5,000 likes.
On social media, the reaction to Roderick’s apology was mixed.
A person tweeted that “comes very close to something I would accept, but it’s like mixing oil in water. ‘I thought it was okay to pretend to be a donkey because I never had to deal with the things I was mocking’ it’s not really the time for growth personal he seems to think he is. “
Other tweeted: “I promised I wouldn’t tweet about the bean dad anymore, but ‘I thought being an ally meant using slander, but in a cool way’ is the funniest apology I’ve ever heard.”