Way back in the Love Island glory days, we bore witness to a season so filled with drama it kept us glued to our screen for two months straight – literally. Much of said drama came in the form of Georgia Steel, the token brunette pocket rocket of that season, whose phrase ‘I’m loyal, babes!’ went down in the Love Island meme history books.
But Georgia was also known for another controversy during that season, one marked with more severity than her typical boisterous dramatics: she was accused of racial micro aggressions against Kaz Crossley after continuously mispronouncing her name as ‘Kez’ despite being corrected numerous times. At the time, Kaz had begun dating her previous partner, Josh Denzel, after the pair met in Casa Amor.
Now, the backlash has returned once more after her appearance on Love Island’s Aftersun last weekend when she made the same error discussing Shaq Muhammad. ‘I think my strongest would be Tanya and Zack? Zack,’ Georgia says apprehensively. ‘Tanya and Shaq?’ host Maya Jama corrects, before Georgia agrees she meant Shaq. ‘I pronounce it Zack because I always get it wrong, so I just call him Zack, but I know that’s obviously not his name,’ she explained.
Viewers have been quick to respond to Georgia’s comments, asking why it’s so difficult for her to pronounce Shaq correctly when it’s a simple, one syllable name. But frankly, the issue doesn’t stop there. Regardless of how difficult a name might seem to say, as someone who does not suffer with speech difficulties it’s entirely disrespectful to choose to pronounce it wrong despite knowing your mistake. In fact, purposefully mispronouncing someone’s name is a micro-aggression, and it happens all too often to Black people. In a poll presented by Race Equality Matters, 73% of respondents from more than 100 organisations shared that they had their names mispronounced.
Mispronouncing the names of Black Islanders has been a common issue on Love Island, with season five contestants revealing that a similarly uncomfortable conversation was had between Lucie Donlan and Yewande Biala during their time on the show.
Lucie responded to the backlash in a 2021 interview with MailOnline, after the comments from her 2019 resurfaced online.
'These are really old comments dug up purely to incite a row between two females. In this day and age and with everything going on in the world, we should all be sticking together not attacking each other. I've been sent death threats which are incredibly scary as you can imagine
'I said on the show I had trouble pronouncing Yewande's name, it's just what I'm like. And I asked if I could use a shortened abbreviated version of her name instead as a term of endearment – there's nothing sinister to it. I regret how just a few old comments sent 18 months ago has snowballed like this and got out of hand, and drummed up some needless negativity. Can we all just move on from this please?'
Since Georgia has also been accused of this once before, viewers have found it difficult to take lightly.
Grazia reached out to Georgia for comment on this story but has not yet received a reply.