Why the author of Girl, Stop Apologizing had to apologize twice in a week

Earlier this week, influencer and bestselling self-help author Rachel Hollis apologized for appearing to compare herself to Harriet Tubman. “I know I’ve caused tremendous pain by mentioning prominent women — including several women of color — whose struggles and achievements I couldn’t possibly understand,” the author of Girl, Wash Your Face and Girl, Stop Apologizing wrote in an Instagram post. The post served as her second apology over the controversy, which has been roiling on social media for nearly two weeks.

Hollis’s ill-fated Harriet Tubman comparison emerged in a now-deleted TikTok video posted in late March, in which she responded to charges that when she talks about “this sweet woman” in her employ who “cleans the toilets,” she sounds “unrelatable.”

“What is it about me that made you think I want to be relatable?” Hollis asked rhetorically. “No, sis. Literally everything I do in my life is to live a life that most people can’t relate to.”

After outlining some of the ways in which she sees herself as exceptional, including her willingness to wake up at 4 am and fail publicly when she has to, Hollis comes to her conclusion: “Literally every woman that I look up to is unrelatable,” she says. “If my life is relatable to most people, I’m doing it wrong.”

The video’s caption reads, “Harriet Tubman, RBG, Marie Curie, Oprah Winfrey, Amelia Earhart, Frida Kahlo, Malala Yousafzai, Wu Zetian … all Unrelatable AF. Happy Women’s History Month.”

For many observers, the post appeared clumsy at best and racist at worst. Was Hollis really saying that her struggles to build a brand as a lifestyle guru — a brand built on the sense she has created that she is just like her fans — was the same as Harriet Tubman escaping slavery and then going back to help other enslaved people escape? And was she really trying to tell her followers that she never wanted to be relatable after selling thousands of books telling them all the ways in which she was the same kind of person they were? And was she really doing it while simultaneously referring to her housekeeper as the “woman who cleans her toilets”?

“EVERYONE works as hard as you do,” wrote one Twitter responder, “especially the woman on her hands and knees scrubbing your toilet while you prance around making videos abt how much better you are than she is & call it ‘work.’”

“The privilege to fail so majorly so often is one I, or any Black woman, do not have,” said the self-help author Luvvie Ajayi Jones on Instagram. “People try to destroy us for much less. Meanwhile, she goes to sell 2 million books without effort while saying appalling things. She still has 1.7 million followers. That is privilege.”

On April 4, Hollis made her first apology — but it was an apology that displaced all blame for what happened onto those who, Hollis said, had misinterpreted her, and a “team” that had failed to do its job correctly. In a now-deleted Instagram post, she maintained that she had not actually been comparing herself to any of the women that she had mentioned, and that “to believe that because I mentioned them, I am comparing myself to them is ludicrous.”

She added that she had waited so long to respond to the backlash over her original video because she believed her “team” when they said they could handle things, and instead, “I should have listened to my gut.”

In the face of widespread criticism, Hollis would eventually delete this apology and replace it with another. “I am so deeply sorry for the things I said in my recent posts and the hurt I have caused in the past few days,” she wrote, adding, “By talking about my own success, I diminished the struggles and hard work of many people who work tirelessly every day.”