Reality TV Hall of Shame Moment: Big Brother 11’s Braden Slurs His Speech

Big Brother is one of the most intense social games in all of reality television. You’re trapped with complete strangers (for the most part), for up to three months, with little to no contact with the outside world. These same people that you must live with, people that you may grow to love or hate, will in the end determine your fate in the game. The last thing you want to do is give them a reason to get rid of you.

So when Braden reacted to his nomination with verbal abuse and racial slurs, it was pretty clear where things were headed. After a week in the house, Braden has been sent home, and has earned his spot here in the Reality TV Hall of Shame.

Here’s the skinny on the incident, which I had the dubious pleasure of recapping from the live feeds. In Week 1, Chima and Lydia were nominated for eviction. Lydia convinced the Athletes clique (led by Head of Household Jessie and muscle twin Russell), that Braden was a “shaker” in the house, and a strategic threat down the road. After Russell won the first Power of Veto competition, he used his power to save Lydia and Jessie backdoored Braden.

On the surface, this seems like a pretty commonplace action in the house. Nominations happen, scheming takes place, someone is betrayed, and the backdoor strategy goes into effect. It happens. It doesn’t always happen in the first week, but it happens nonetheless.

Braden, who from all outward appearances was a down-to-earth, goofy surfer, suddenly turned into a psychopath. The day after his nomination, he confronted Lydia and her teammate Kevin in the backyard. He initially called Lydia out on her betrayal, but stepped over the line by calling her a bitch, a skank, and a slut.

Kevin rose to defend his teammate and friend, so Braden turned on him. He told Kevin to go home to Mexico, called him a “beaner” (a racial epithet degrading Hispanic people, for those blissfully unaware), and proclaimed that even if he were to be evicted, that he would come out on top, as he’s a white American.

These words understandably caused a raucous uproar in the house between the parties involved, as well as Jeff and Jordan by extension, as they were Braden’s quasi-allies in the early going. It was not pretty, to say the least.

The problem with what Braden said was two-fold. First and foremost, the Big Brother house is not like the outside world, where offensive language can be, and is, uttered in casual situations amongst people who understand the context and character of the individual. In the house, you don’t have that luxury of casualness and commonality. You don’t know who you’re dealing with or who you might offend, and it’s just stupid to say such ignorant things.

The second problem is one of misuse. It’s bad enough that he called Kevin a beaner, but what compounds it is the fact that Kevin isn’t even Hispanic. In the season premiere, Kevin revealed that he is “Blackanese,” a cute term for a mixture of black and Japanese. It’s dumb enough to use a racial slur, but to use the wrong one is even dumber. Ironically (a concept completely lost on Braden, let me assure you), Lydia does have Hispanic heritage, so she was indirectly double-slurred by Braden’s attacks, prompting her understandable response, “Kiss my Latin ass!”

A dishonorable mention for this moment goes to the producers of the show and CBS itself. When it came time to decide Braden’s fate, the controversy was not shown. If you only saw the show itself, all you saw was a poorly edited scene where a fight breaks out over Braden calling Lydia a skank.

To further humiliate themselves, during the live portion of the eviction show, when the nominees get one last chance to defend themselves, Chima used the incident to her advantage. Instead of the usual “I love it here, and I love you guys” speech that most nominees use because the vote is already a slam dunk, Chima went on the offensive, mostly because there was still a chance she could be evicted. She gave an impassioned speech in which she mentioned the incident and the words Braden used, saying that a vote for him was a vote for a bigot and misogynist. Using the five-second delay all live broadcasts must have due to FCC regulations (or because “live” doesn’t really quite mean “live” when it comes to Big Brother), the censors were able to mute the vast majority of her speech, in a fairly obvious attempt to hide the comments.

This made no sense. It’s not like the show or the network has had any problem with this sort of thing before. In Season 9, eventual winner Adam earned a spot here in the Hall of Shame for calling autistic children “retards,” even though his job at the time (he was fired for the comments) was to represent a charity for autistic children. CBS aired the slur, even though it occurred during a competition that happened before the show premiered, so the live feeds weren’t even running. If CBS hadn’t aired it, no one would have known.

Yet in this case, the incident was carried on the feeds and CBS actively chose to delete it. One has to wonder why Adam deserved to be publicly humiliated while Braden deserved a degree of protection, at the expense of both the truth and the production quality of the show.

Stupidity always rears its head in the Big Brother house, whether it’s Marcellas not using the Veto to save himself, or Joshuah orchestrating his own eviction. We also have people like Adam and Big Brother 2’s Justin, who say and do ignorant things that are not acceptable in most facets of society, much less in the house.

Braden, like many before him, realized too late that completely free speech really doesn’t exist in this house or in this game. You can say what you want under most circumstances, but like a criminal case, anything you say can and will be used against you. Braden degraded an entire race of people in an attempt to degrade a man with two ethnicities, neither of which applied. Stupid on top of stupid.

Then he added to the stupid in his RealityNewsOnline interview when he wouldn’t even use the first person in describing how he used the epithets. He said things like, “things got escalated and heated up and things were said that I didn’t mean to be said, out of no malice.” “Things were said”? As if they just came out without him uttering the words.

Then Braden went on to say, “It just came out the wrong way.” It’s not clear what the “right” way would have been for such a thing to come out, but he then tried to rationalize it by adding, “The whole reason it might have came out was that he lives right on the border.” To further confuse the issue, he added the non-sequitur, “And I was just in China, I like Chinese people, they’re great.” He ended the interview by saying, in part, “I don’t regret anything in there,” which makes no sense since he had already apologized. All in all, he did nothing to either explain or redeem himself when he finally had the perfect opportunity to do so.

The maelstrom that resulted in the game from Braden’s ignorant words derailed his best chance of survival, which was his (until that moment) calm, friendly demeanor. CBS’ active efforts to suppress this information only led to more people knowing about it, compounding the problem. For those reasons, Braden’s big mouth has earned him a spot here in the Reality TV Hall of Shame.

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Big Brother 11 on SuperPass: What they can't show you on TV.