Reality Bites Back

IN THE BEGINNING, the Network Suits said, “Let them be white,” and reality TV cast members were white.

Seasons passed, and they multiplied to a mighty celluloid nation, populated by dominant men and decorative women, Bachelors and Top Models, Apprentices and Swans. We shall remember this age as “BF.”^cm

After half a decade the Cable Suits gazed upon their Network neighbors’ unscripted creations, saw the ratings bounty sexism had provided, and grew envious. Then the Cable Suits decreed that producers must layer racism atop their misogynistic bedrock, saying, “Let us remake Black people in advertising’s eternal image.” So producers birthed a minstrel show and called it Flavor of Love, and it was bad, and Kentucky Fried Chicken was happy.^cn Flavor of Love begat Flavor of Love Girls: Charm School and I Love New York, which begat Real Chance of Love. And lo, people of color began to rule over their own plots of televisual land. But there was much suffering; visibility became a plague on their McMansions. Competing Cable Suits discovered Black Housewives in Atlanta, reformed Black and Latino men From G’s to Gents, and taught White Rappers their place. And so it was, and so it still is today. We shall call this age “AF.”^co

To understand how reality TV has represented race generally—and women of color particularly—it’s helpful to think in epochs. Before Flavor of Love (BF, 2000-2006), broadcast networks kept their casts predominately white, and the presence of people of color was marked by marginalization, tokenism, and typecasting. This show heralded a sea change: Reality TV racism went from subtext to text. People of color were no longer confined to the background or quickly eliminated, especially on cable. But increased visibility came with a steep price: stereotyping recalling the racist archetypes of 1800s minstrel theater, early 1900s radio, and 1950s sitcoms.

Producers of template-setting dating series sought to manufacture a fractured reality that looks nothing like America. The casting process started with ethnic homogeneity. The longest-running reality romance series, The Bachelor, has cast a white man as Prince Charming from its 2002 debut to its fourteenth season in 2010. Knockoffs such as Fox’s Joe Millionaire and NBC’s Who Wants to Marry My Dad? followed suit. To be sure, one or two women of color typically turn up on any given network dating show’s first episode—tokens amid fifteen to twenty-five white women. Usually at least one nonwhite bachelorette squeaks by to the second round of “group dates” so that Mr. White B. Wright can avoid being labeled a racist. The few Black, Latina, or Asian women who do appear rarely get much screen time, and are generally eliminated shortly after their series debuts.^cq Add the requisite limos, catfights, and “dream dates,” and viewers can be forgiven if they assume ABC, NBC, and Fox generate dating show footage by sending cameras to a white prom and rolling tape.

The same whitewashing appears on the few series with many men wooing one woman. By 2010, all five queen bees of The Bachelorette, ABC’s programmatic afterthought, were white. So was Melana Scantlin, the beauty queen NBC hoodwinked into dating a bunch of nonhunks on Average Joe. Intending to prove women superficial in matters of the heart, producers sought men considered “ugly” (not merely “average”) by pop culture standards. Amid a mix of obese, scrawny, and sloppy white men was Tareq Kabir, a young, physically fit South Asian professor with a computer science PhD. Well-groomed and attractive (if tongue-tied around pretty women), Kabir seemed to be considered undatable by NBC mostly because of his ethnicity. Fans circulated a protest letter calling the network “particularly negligent” for “featur[ing] Asian men finally,” only “to propagate the destructive stereotype of Asian men as being somehow sexually undesirable.”²

The opposite has been true for Asian women, who’ve usually been fetishized rather than desexualized on network dating shows (when rarely they’ve appeared). Korean American lingerie model Lola Corwin was featured on Temptation Island— as an “exotic” “temptress” hired by Fox to seduce men away from their girlfriends. She parlayed her brush with reality TV fame into pinup work for Playboy, Venus swimwear, and soft-core “East West” and “ImagineAsian” nudie calendars featuring “hot Asian chicks.” Corwin foreshadowed A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, the only dating show ever headlined by an Asian American woman (it aired in 2007, the AF era). MTV used Tila,^cq Playboy’s first “Asian Cyber Girl of the Month,” to turn the premise of a bisexuality-themed search for love into a campy sleaze-fest. Contestants all slept in the same giant bed and competed in lingerie contests to win dates with the partially clothed pinup.³

After hundreds of prime-time hours, only one Latina defied The Bachelor’s early elimination rut. Husband-hunter Mary Delgado brought Bob Guiney to meet her parents on season 4’s “hometown date” semifinals. Producers had no idea how to handle the language barrier between “spicy” Mary’s white suitor and her Cuban American immigrant family. We saw video of the usual “what are your intentions toward my daughter?” scene as Mary’s dad grilled Bob—for display only. No translator or captions were provided for his long Spanish monologue. Viewers didn’t get to hear whether Papa Delgado warmly welcomed his potential future son-in-law, as per the show’s unrealistic conventions, or issued some version of the classic overprotective dad’s “hurt my daughter and I’ll make you wish you were never born” warning. The awkward segment tacitly implied that their interracial pairing would never “fit.”

After Mary was “marked consistently . . . by her Cuban ethnicity,”⁴ Bob’s rejection of her felt inevitable. Producers brought her back on the sixth season to compete for a ring from a white bass fisherman named Byron Velvick, but this time they downplayed her Cuban heritage. Why? Because Byron proposed to her in the end, challenging ABC’s “love is for white folks” frame. By “whitening” Mary, The Bachelor attempted to minimize the discomfort the network assumed its audience would have with a woman of color as a “princess.”

Georgia’s “white prom,” along with scholarly research,⁵ proves we are by no means a color-blind society. But reality TV producers codify, rather than reflect, viewers’ prejudices. Corporate media lag behind Americans’ increasingly progressive attitudes around sex, love, and race. Just a year after Byron and Mary were lauded as a Bachelor “success story” on a reunion episode,^cr the United States elected our first Black president, Barack Obama, whose mother was white and whose father was Kenyan. Eighty-three percent of Americans approved of interracial dating in 2009, compared with 48 percent in 1987.⁶ Likewise, on Married by America, viewers selected a Mexican American woman named Cortez as the potential arranged bride for aw-shucks Southern boy Matt, who (like every other participant) was white. But after the couples started playing house, they were the first voted off by Fox’s “expert” panel.

When women of color were, infrequently, allowed into BF casts, they were almost always edited to stoke classic racial stereotypes. Stock characters such as the “Black Bitch,” the “Entitled Diva,” the “Hootchie Mama,” the “Ghetto Girl,” and the “Mammy” were pioneered in reality TV by America’s Next Top Model in 2003 and persist today on many series. The following are a few of the ways these stereotypes have played out in BF reality programming.^cs

THE BLACK BITCH (A.K.A. THE ENTITLED DIVA)

The “Angry Black Woman” (ABW)—also known in the reality TV universe as the “Diva with Attitude”—has been a staple throughout various subgenres, from competition to lifestyle to dating and domesticity series. She made her network debut on Top Model, as we’ll see in chapter 6, but quickly took up shop in many unscripted series. On Wife Swap, the first thing we learn about “pampered” African American hairdresser D’eva Robinson is that “I consider myself a diva so much that I am legally changing my name to D’eva.” (AF, this bitchy bogey-woman trope thrives on The Real Housewives of Atlanta, where Black women’s backstabbing, verbal sparring, and physical fights draw boffo ratings for Bravo.)

The ABW is an updated version of the Sapphire trope of Black women as “rude, loud, malicious, stubborn, and overbearing,” which later originated with a character of the same name in the 1928 radio show Amos & Andy, which later aired as a sitcom on CBS through 1966. The Sapphire has “irrational states of anger and indignation—prone to being mean-spirited and abusive [with] venom for anyone who insults or disrespects her.”⁸

Make that infamous. The breakout star of NBC’s series, Omarosa was statuesque, tough-talking, and accomplished. Her resume was as hefty as her midriff-baring clothes^ct were skimpy. A doctoral candidate at Howard University, she had worked in the Clinton White House. Once Donald Trump and Mark Burnett were done with her, she added another title to her CV: “the most reviled person in reality TV history.”

That’s how TV Guide described her, ranking her number one on their list of all-time “Top Ten Reality TV Villains.” A Mahogany magazine cover story attributed her supposedly diabolical behavior to genetics: “Natural Born Villain,” their headline read. Print, broadcast, and online journalists—not to mention bloggers and TV fans—described her as an “evil sistah,” a “moral cretin,” and a “she-devil.”⁹

It wasn’t her behavior. She played the Apprentice game like an egotistical schemer, but no more so than most contestants on cutthroat competition shows. She was verbally vicious, slacked off sometimes, and never backed down from a fight: again, par for the course. So, what “high cultural treason” did she commit to make Entertainment Weekly say that “every single black woman . . . wanted to punch her” because “she was taking down all sisters with her”?¹¹

Omarosa’s sin: She dared to talk about race on national TV. When her competitors disliked her, she said it was because they were intimidated by a strong Black woman (she was the only woman of color among the cast). She was motivated by the show’s $250K prize money, not political purpose—she seemed to use accusations of racism as a strategy to throw white competitors off kilter. When a tipsy white woman said “that’s like calling the kettle black,” Omarosa snapped back, “ There you go with your racist terms . . . try to contain your prejudice, okay?” ^cu

That comment opened the floodgates for racial typecasting. Producers spent the rest of the season framing her as manipulative, untrustworthy, and lazy. Her fellow contestants constantly attacked her, screaming in her face while she remained calm, yet editors branded Omarosa the “angry bitch” of The Apprentice. When she insisted on taking time off to see a doctor after concrete fell on her head at a construction challenge, she was said to lack a work ethic. The Donald called her “rude,” “vicious,” and “repulsive.” In her final episode, she burst into his boardroom uninvited to defend herself and was fired. Viewers didn’t know that she only went into the room because producers told her to, a classic bait-and-switch that solidified her status as an entitled, unprofessional diva. In a typical editorial response, a Chicago Sun Times columnist wrote that this “prime-time ‘Angry Black Woman’” gave America “a view of a stereotypical black woman in over her head.”¹³

Most reality show contestants quickly exhaust their fifteen minutes. Not Omarosa. In 2005, she spoke at a congressional forum called “Me, Inc.,” which aimed to “empower participants to better market themselves by creating their own personal brand.” No one knows how to do that better than Omarosa, who built a lucrative career based on the ABW persona assigned to her by reality TV producers. In 2008, she made the talk show rounds to promote her book, The Bitch Switch: Knowing How to Turn It On and Off. She turned it on that same year when she became the only former Apprentice candidate to appear on The Celebrity Apprentice. And Trump couldn’t have thought she was so “repulsive” after all, since he teamed up with TV One and Comcast in 2009 to create Omarosa’s Ultimate Merger, based on the premise that “it is time for this strong-willed and wily schemer to settle down and find a husband.” In keeping with the classic “domineering, aggressive, and emasculating” Sapphire stereotype, a TV One press release promised that “successful, egotistical” men will “fight back” against their “difficult” star, to “tame this shrew.” The network claims the series will be not only “a guilty pleasure” but also a “compelling take on universal aspects of the black experience.”¹⁴

Omarosa has capitalized on a virulent stereotype about Black women, a path Apprentice producers laid out for her. “When I was a good girl, there were no cameras on,” she told Time. “The minute I started arguing, there was a camera shooting me from every angle.” So she played the game, and she was turned into a national punching bag. This should come as no surprise: The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia explains that the classic Sapphire stereotype has functioned as “a social control mechanism that is employed to punish Black women who violate the societal norms that encourage Black women to be passive, servile, nonthreatening, and unseen.”¹⁵

THE MAMMY: “IF THEY’RE NOT HAPPY, I’M NOT HAPPY.”

Aired by ABC in February 2003 at the same time as corporate journalists were beating the drums for war in Iraq, the show cynically attempted to exploit post-9/11 fear and patriotism for ratings, and to increase support for the impending U.S. invasion.^cv Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer (known for war blockbusters like Black Hawk Down and Pearl Harbor) with full cooperation from the Pentagon, Profiles employed all the bells and whistles Hollywood could muster to gin up anti-Arab, anti-Muslim sentiment. Action unfolded through tension-building night-vision cameras. With faux-documentary overtones, episodes opened with a narrator announcing that “U.S. Special Operations Forces . . . highly skilled in unconventional warfare, communications, intelligence, and diplomacy” were leading “Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. . . . These are their stories.”

In numerous breath-holding scenes, Brave Men in Uniform Did Their Duty to Keep You Safe, searching for weapons, interrogating combatants, and performing lifesaving surgery. The Great American Hope Profiles presented was not just a buff boy in uniform; he was, largely, a buff white boy. While Afghan people were given screen time to build Bruckheimer’s narrative, military personnel of color were largely overlooked, giving the impression that Americans are white and our enemies are not. These tales of heroism were also highly gendered. Men did the saving and women provided support, in keeping with Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream, which details how “media, entertainment, and advertising declared the post-9/11 age an era of neofifties . . . redomesticated femininity, and reconstituted Cold Warrior manhood.”¹⁷ Hence, a ponytailed blond medic who worked on a transport plane enthused that her job offered “a weight loss plan for women over thirty: ‘Pump your bags every other day, extreme heat, and no food!’”^cw Images of male strength and bravado were juxtaposed with tearjerker home-front interviews with grieving white war widows and moms saying their husbands and sons were risking life and limb to protect America and “fight evil.” (Of course, the role of evil was uniformly cast with Afghan men, whose speech was often untranslated and whose mere presence in a scene was enough to indicate “enemy,” even when they were working for the troops.)

When race and gender intersected, the Profile wasn’t pretty. While they featured courageous white Special Forces dudes and stoic white widows and moms and reduced a dedicated servicewoman to “Army Barbie,” they also introduced us to Sargeant First Class Danette Jones. An African American woman who oversaw food services in Bagram, she had a role that was captioned on-screen: “Mission: Breakfast for 3500.” Here’s what we learned about the only woman of color profiled on the episode: “My job is to supervise the kitchen, ensure that everything is getting done properly by the book, and the soldiers are happy. I feed everybody in this tent.” As cameras panned over Jones dishing grub, she narrated, “We got steak, eggs, hash browns. . . . Keep the line goin’—put steak and bacon on that plate!” She lamented that “these soldiers work so hard it’s pathetic, and they don’t get no thank-yous, no morale boost,” but at least when they eat her food she knows she’s “doing a good job—these soldiers are enjoying what they’re getting!” But as per Hollywood’s usual script about women of color, you wouldn’t like her when she’s angry: “I scare people. I’m called ‘The Intimidator,’” she said, brandishing a large knife. “To be truthfully honest, I be a bitch in the kitchen.”

Black people make up 13.2 percent, and women make up 11.3 percent, of service members deployed in the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.¹⁸ Thousands of Black servicewomen hold a wide range of positions in Afghanistan and Iraq. They provide crucial support such as food prep, translation, and strategic information analysis. They also face danger head-on: They drive trucks in bomb-filled areas, serve as tank gunners, raid houses, guard prisoners, and rescue the wounded in battle. But those women were ignored by Profiles from the Front Line, just like the news media virtually ignored the heroism of Army Specialist Shoshana Johnson, the first Black woman ever to be held as a prisoner of war in 2003.^cx

The “mammy” archetype, in which Black women play fawning domestic servants, cooks, and surrogate mothers for white people, originated in minstrel theater but has haunted Black women in American media. In late 1800s advertising, Aunt Jemima breakfast products were marketed with the image of a heavyset, grinning, kerchief-wearing Black woman described in original ads as a former slave. Aunt Jemima is one of the most enduring and famous ad campaigns, partly because she taps into what author M. M. Manring has called nostalgic “perceptions of the South as a culture of white leisure and black labor. Aunt Jemima’s ready-mixed products offered middle-class housewives the next best thing to a black servant: a ‘slave in a box’ that conjured up romantic images of not only the food but also the social hierarchy of the plantation South.”²⁰

Mammy made her way from advertising to television in 1950-1953, when ABC began airing The Beulah Show, the first American sitcom to revolve around an African American star. Called the “queen of the kitchen,” the title character was a middle-aged Black domestic servant for a white family. Though Beulah was a comedy, the NAACP didn’t find it funny: At their 1951 convention, the civil rights organization condemned the series for perpetuating prejudices “that Negroes and other minorities are inferior, lazy, dumb and dishonest.” ²¹ In the 1980s, Nell Carter “revived the archetype of mammy” as a loud but loving housekeeper for a white family on NBC’s Gimme a Break!²² And the image popped up again on a 2004 episode of ABC’s Wife Swap, in the form of a mammy cookie jar and a mammy children’s doll in the home of a white Southern family. For pointing out that these items are part of the legacy of slavery, Shelley Elliott, the Black “swapee” mom from Maryland, was framed as “inappropriate” and oversensitive. “Drop it!” the white teen daughter screamed at her.

SILENT NATIVES, NOISY GONGS

In FX’s Black. White., a Black family from Atlanta (Brian, Renee, and son Nick) and a white family from Santa Monica (Carmen, daughter Rose, and Carmen’s boyfriend, Bruno), used studio-quality full-body makeup to “trade races.”^cy Producers promoted the show as a progressive exposé of hidden racism. “This series is an example of how television can be an extremely powerful and useful medium,” they told reporters, promising it would “force people to challenge themselves and really examine where we stand in terms of race in this country.” To hear FX tell it, their “docu-series” would be like a modern update to Black Like Me, which chronicled a white journalist’s experience passing as Black in the civil-rights-era South. Many media outlets bought into the bogus framing, calling it a “provocative exploration of race relations,” and a “documentary” answering the age-old question, “What’s it like to live in someone else’s skin?”²³

Yet Black. White. had little in common with ethical documentary. Instead, producers used every trick in the reality TV arsenal proven to generate melodrama. They cast people they knew would clash, forced them to live in the same house, then edited the show to reinforce stereotypes. In blackface, Bruno denied the existence of racism and said he was looking forward to strangers calling him “nigger.” In whiteface, Brian was depicted as an Angry Black Man who jumped at any possible opportunity to “cry racism.” In an attempt to be a convincing Black woman, Carmen bought an African-print dashiki and greeted Renee with “Yo, bitch!” The teens learned that etiquette classes represent white culture, while poetry slams and “gangsta rap” represent black culture. All this was set to the tune of “Race Card,” the theme song by coproducer Ice Cube.

The premise that “race relations” only apply to African Americans and Caucasians was problematic enough.^cz But Black. White. wanted us to believe two deeper mythologies. First, that ethnic identity is only skin-deep and second, that racism is about individual attitudes, not societal structures. As journalist Sheerly Avni wrote, this hides the fact that “we can’t [eradicate] racial conflict without dismantling the institutions that help perpetuate it,” such as “failing educational systems; welfare reform; [and] measures like the Rockefeller Drug Laws.”²⁴

Where Black. White. pretended that a lifetime of racist barriers or privileged opportunity could be experienced—or sloughed off—with a quick trip to a makeup salon, other shows have co-opted entire countries through clichéd cultural reduction. This kind of fetishization is standard practice on ANTM, especially during “destination” episodes. Lion dancers pranced, martial artists played with swords, and gongs blared when Tyra Banks told her models they were going to China. In Brazil, they got styled like Carmen Miranda (explained as the Chiquita Banana lady) for a photo shoot in a Sāo Paulo favela (slum). Glam cams used poor children playing on garbage-strewn streets to lend gritty authenticity to the pictures, while judges swept their poverty under the rug, complaining that some contestants didn’t look joyful enough since “there’s a lot of happiness in favela.”^da

Survivor pushes cultural appropriation to its limits, often presenting a colonialist vision of Westerners in “foreign” lands—especially true on Survivor: Africa, where voiceless locals and their customs were portrayed as primitive and shocking. As scholar H. Leslie Steeves notes, “One of the two appearances by Kenyans is a Samburu blood-drinking challenge . . . their role is to bring in the cows, wear traditional clothes, retrieve the blood, and serve as props. They never speak.” Steeves sees similar representations on The Amazing Race “at almost every location in Africa. . . . Additionally, a colorfully (sometimes scantily) dressed native stands next to host Phil Keoghan at every location and greets teams as they arrive at finish lines . . . the locals at the end became almost entirely decorative, with no more than one scripted line, for instance, ‘Welcome to Burkina Faso.’ ” In this way, reality TV’s tourism competitions mirror classic adventure tourism advertising, “by emphasizing differences over similarities between visitors and visited.” ²⁵

Though Survivor and The Amazing Race engage in cultural appropriation, there’s a mammoth difference between the two CBS shows. Survivor lacks diversity and glories in gross-out contests and petty dramas; TAR features inclusive casting and unusually conscientious editing. While they often show Americans behaving badly abroad—yelling at herbalists in Thailand, harassing cab drivers in India—TAR producers frame entitled, ignorant snits as unacceptable. “Such Ugly American behavior elicits bad-guy music on the soundtrack and dirty looks from passersby,” travel writer Bob Harris notes. And unlike other reality shows, we’re allowed to see participants express remorse when they’ve been hostile or bigoted: After being rude to a taxi driver, gay Christian activist Mel White, who competed with his actor son, Mike, told the cameras, “This race certainly isn’t important enough to dehumanize someone by yelling and screaming at them. So I’m going to feel bad about that for the rest of the day.” TAR is unique in bringing viewers something they rarely see in the corporate media landscape: a constantly updated queue of insights into the lives and cultures of communities across the globe. They visit Kuwaiti souks, Ukrainian concert halls, and Mongolian monasteries. Traditions are often condensed or staged to the point of misrepresentation, but this trivialization is balanced by TAR’s potential educational benefit to audiences, who learn that “the world outside our borders is filled with creative and resilient people.” Asks Harris, “When do American television audiences ever even see Estonia, Madagascar, or Burkina Faso on a map, much less watch fellow Americans engaging in any way with their customs?”²⁶

BEAUTY “CORRECTION”

Producers have granted a sketchy “equality” in incorporating Black, Latina, and East and South Asian women into these casts (though Native Americans and Arab Americans are still mostly invisible in this subgenre). But proportional equity becomes a double-edged sword once the judges start critiquing, the surgeons start slicing, and the video editors start cherry-picking for attacks on any deviation from media-approved beauty standards. Once racial beauty biases are added to the genre’s already bitterly sexist brew, the resulting representations can be damaging to cultural perceptions (and internalized self-impressions) of women and girls of color.

Some series teach us that ethnic features must be “fixed,” by drastic means if necessary. Plastic surgeons with questionable ethics give insecure women of all ethnicities boob jobs, liposuction, and face-lifts on shows such as Extreme Makeover, The Swan, and Dr. 90210, ignoring medical risks and reinforcing problematic ideas about women’s worth. Yet they don’t make white surgical candidates feel like their cultural identity should also be on the chopping block—or that they’d be so much more attractive and fulfilled if only they didn’t look so

. . . Caucasian. In contrast, TV docs’ scalpels reduce or remove racial markers on patients of color. Black women’s noses and lips are made smaller. In an increasingly common procedure targeting Asian women, creases are added to Asian women’s eyelids. And while white women’s surgery is “never figured as having racial meaning” on shows like Extreme Makeover:

the “concerns of ethnic cosmetic surgery” are discussed and dismissed by introducing a Black surgeon, who explains that, of course, all of his patients want to retain their distinctive ethnic appearance, but also aspire to make their features more “proportionate,” or suitable for their individual face . . . in a show that relies on the language of authenticity, the specter of “passing” is never more palpable than when race is at stake.²⁷

A similar (though less invasive) narrative exists on talent programs. A classic example is what I like to call “The Homogenator,” the American Idol style machine. For Idol ’s female singers, non-Western features are often treated as a liability. White girls who look like Britney Spears circa “ . . . Baby One More Time” have squeaked by with faulty pitch and minimal vocal range, a luxury not afforded to Black, Latina, and biracial female contestants. Instead, their curly, kinky, and dark hair is nearly always straightened and/or lightened, with makeup and fashion carefully selected to mask full lips and curvy behinds. “This is an image business,” judge Simon Cowell has rationalized. “Image” was the euphemism he used on season 2 when he told African American contestant Kimberley Locke that her rich, sultry singing voice was wonderful, but it couldn’t compensate for her plus-size body and her “weird” hair. That was his coded admission that as a music producer and pop star puppet master, he considers natural Black hair unattractive and unmarketable. Cowell didn’t stop haranguing her until she emerged from The Homogenator, a process chronicled in a segment on a live Idol results show. In front of a massive studio audience, a photo of Kim auditioning with kinky hair was blown up on a giant screen:

HOST RYAN SEACREST: And the hair. The hair is different.

KIMBERLEY LOCKE: The hair is different. I love to wear my hair straight but it takes a looong time.

RYAN: To get your hair straight?

KIM: Like two hours! And then I got highlights so it took like four hours. So I was like, “This is so not worth it.”

As troubling and should-have-been unnecessary as those four hours were, they changed Kimberley’s fate on the show. As Idol’s most influential voice during the first nine seasons, Cowell often helped determine which singers viewers voted to keep in the competition. After she acquiesced to The Homogenator, here’s how Cowell responded to her vocal performance: “Ever since you got rid of that weird hair, you got better. No, seriously! Because you look cute now! You do!” Once given silky, lightened hair that looked more like white women’s locks, he finally saw Locke as a singer he could sell—crucial on a show built around embedded advertisers.^db

On second thought, someone should lend Simon a copy of Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America, by Ayana Byrd and Lori Tharps, for an education on the social, cultural, and economic implications of what he so crudely called “weird hair.” Cowell has taken his place in a century’s worth of media makers and marketers to reinforce the notion that “good hair” (white or, sometimes, Asian hair) is key to women’s social and professional success, while “bad hair” (Black, often Latina, and sometimes Jewish hair) is naturally ugly and “low-class.”

For that matter, someone should sit Tyra Banks down for some education on the subject. For all her “girls of color are beautiful!” rhetoric she almost never allows African American models to compete with their hair kinky, curly, nappy, or otherwise natural. Yes, all women get dramatic makeovers on Top Model—but shortening a redhead’s long tresses or making a brunet go blond doesn’t bear the sociological significance of policing Black hair with weaves and often-painful chemical treatments. In “Why Hair Is Political,” Susannah Walker writes:

African American hair has historically symbolized and continues to reflect struggles over race and gender in the United States. This . . . has been demonstrated in news stories about black women being fired from their jobs, or girls being sent home from school, for wearing braids, dreadlocks, or other hairstyles deemed “extreme” by employers and principals.²⁸

Outside, their suitor, a Black man twice their age, sported an oversized hot pink suit, a glittery bow tie, and a black top hat, with a giant clock on a chain around his neck. When he grabbed the doorknob to enter the manor, the camera zoomed in on his short, white gloves, the sort worn by servants and minstrels. Seeing his groupies for the first time, he danced toward them with footwork that might as well have been soft-shoe. “Yeaaaaah, girls!” he screamed. “Wasssup, baby? Yeaaaaah!”

By the time Flavor of Love debuted in 2006, eight seasons of The Bachelor had taught viewers what to expect from dating shows: pretty white people, faux sincerity, and the trappings of “fairytale love.” VH1 drastically changed that formula, and not just through diverse casting. Structural differences were built in from the get-go. Instead of a handsome, sophisticated Prince Charming, FoL starred a man whose face was haggard from nearly fifty years of partying and drugs, who had famously done jail time for violent offenses and was arrested for shirking child support. A cheesy, Barry White-sounding narrator introduced us to Flav in an opening montage that coached us to see the aging rapper as an ignorant clown. He wore a dual-horned Viking helmet, played basketball in cheetah-print pajamas, described hideous paintings of himself as “rare, valuable works of art,” and said that despite fame and fortune, “None of these things means nurthin’ without a woman to spend it with.” Hence, his quest to find a recipient for a symbol of his momentary affections: not a diamond ring for her finger, but a gold-plated grille for her teeth.

That’s where the “Flavorettes” came in. Unlike ABC’s perky Stepford Wives in training, VH1 seemed to go out of its way to cast women who had worked in strip clubs, porn, and other sex industry jobs—only to frame them as promiscuous, vulgar train wrecks. Producers portrayed these bachelorettes of color as prone to poor grammar, tacky fashion sense, and outbursts of profanity and violence. By season 2, they were even literally pooping on a staircase. In the press, VH1 programming execs called them “refreshingly real”—but the narrative message we were meant to receive was that these weren’t wholesome, genuine girls next door—they were “low-class” Jezebel whores from the wrong side of the tracks.³⁰

Producers made sure viewers understood that race was the reason why this show was so different from anything we’d seen before. From the archetypical reality TV limousine during the series premiere, Flav screamed, “I know y’all heard of that show called The Bachelor. Flavor Flav is the Black-chelorrrrrrrrrr . . . orrrrrrrrrrr. . . . ”^dd Lest that prove too subtle, he yelled, “I’m the pimp behind the wheels!” He certainly acted the part, demanding “the girls” perform actual or implied sexual favors or get kicked out of the house.

Viewers were never expected to suspend their disbelief to root for the goofy and physically grotesque Flav to find “true love” with any of three seasons’ worth of nubile fame seekers. Producers wanted us to do something else: laugh our asses off. Using the campy conventions of the blaxploitation film genre, Flavor of Love set out to mock people of color for our collective enjoyment. Intrinsic to The Bachelor’s earnest packaging is the pretense that Mr. White B. Wright lets his growing feelings of “connection” determine which women he takes on helicopter rides or whisks off to sun-drenched islands. But on this “ghetto-fabulous” knockoff, ^de Flav didn’t choose his dates—producers did. Women got “alone time” by winning competitions designed to minimize dignity and maximize stereotypes. Some contests involved servitude: The Flavorettes had to compete to be the best maid (in the “clean my shit-filled mansion!” challenge described at the beginning of this chapter), the most diligent fast food joint staffer (“Yo’ man Flavor Flav was puttin’ their ass to work, dog!” he smirked), or to “[cook] the best fried chicken.” Other contests emphasized another set of assets, with Flav judging naughty-nurse challenges, calendar-girl photo shoots, and booty-dance-offs (his instructions: “I want them asses shaking!”). Challenge winners would be rewarded with “romantic dates” to places like Kentucky Fried Chicken(!), whose brand was integrated into numerous episodes.

There were endless excuses for on-command lap dances, lingerie, and slowmo, sexytime camera work while Flav chomped on KFC drumsticks. Flavorettes were often filmed only as disparate body parts: The screen would fill with shots of one woman’s giant, surgically enhanced breasts or another’s ample ass. Flav regularly used dehumanizing language, bragged about dating “all of these beautiful, gorgeous, sexy items.” That paled compared with the show’s ultimate objectification: The women were stripped of their identities, forced to assume nicknames Flav chose and then gropingly affixed to their chests and butts via nametags. “Branded! USDA!” he yelled after christening his playthings. During FoL and in subsequent media interviews and VH1 spinoffs, these modern-day Jezebels were always referred to only by these nicknames, such as “Nibblz” (who had prominent nipples), Deelishis (whose big booty was a series fixation), and “Bootz” (because seeing her, Flav said, made him “wanna knock boots!”).^df

Decades before Flavor of Love, Flavor Flav played a radical role in pop culture. As hype man for socially conscious hip-hop group Public Enemy, he helped to popularize songs like “Fight the Power,” “Don’t Believe the Hype,” “911 (Is a Joke),” and “Fear of a Black Planet,” shining a spotlight on systemic racism, police brutality, and white supremacy. In the 1980s and ’90s, Flav’s crazy costumes, hyperactive energy, and gold teeth were the sugar that made rapper Chuck D’s serious political medicine palatable to mainstream audiences. He’d scream “Yeah, Boooyyyyy!” and “Flava Flaaaaaaav!” and crowds would go wild, while Chuck D railed against racial and economic injustice.

As Public Enemy’s comic foil, Flav clowned for a cause. His group “made hip-hop that was more than entertainment. They inspired a lot of people who believed that you can effect change through music,” Rolling Stone declared, naming them one of the “Greatest Artists of All Time.”³² In contrast, Flavor of Love played like the fantasies of the worst of corporate hip-hip videos, with twenty lusty “bitches” and “hos” throwing themselves at one arrogant rapper.^dg Politically neutralized without Chuck D by his side, VH1 reduced Flav to a shucking-and-jiving fool. (At one point, he proudly wears a jester’s crown.) In return, they received the highest ratings in their network’s history, when nearly 6 million viewers tuned in to FoL’s first finale. VH1 broke their own record later that year, when 7.5 million people made season 2’s finale the number one nonsports telecast on basic cable in 2006. Additionally, FoL 2 was number one in its time slot on cable and broadcast television among eighteen- to forty-nine-year-old African Americans. (VH1 honcho Michael Hirschorn used these ratings to dodge reporters’ questions about “whether the show was exploiting racial stereotypes.”) And though plenty of progressive critics decried the show’s bigotry, Entertainment Weekly included it on a list of “20 Best Reality-TV Shows Ever,” calling it “undeniably mesmerizing—as is the skankertainment genre it spawned.”³³

With Flavor of Love, reality TV used an icon of Black-positive pop culture to bring the minstrel show back to contemporary television. As St. Petersburg Times columnist Eric Deggans noted, Flav colluded with VH1 to bring about this devolution: “One of rap’s most militantly pro-black groups has produced one of TV’s biggest black buffoons. . . . Looks like someone decided that fighting the power wasn’t as profitable as joining it. And we all may be the worse for his choice.” But Black people’s complicity in performing the racist roles producers set out for them is in keeping with the history of American minstrel theater in the 1800s, early-twentieth-century film (such as Mammy and Steamboat Round the Bend) and midcentury radio and TV (such as Amos & Andy). In all these media, Blacks have acted alongside blackface-wearing whites to portray derogatory African American archetypes such as “mammy,” “wench,” “old darky,” “coon,” and slave characters who loved pleasing their masters or, after being freed, longed to return to bondage. (The “dandy”—whose attempts at mixing with white society were meant as comical reminders of his inferiority—wore white gloves similar to those Flav donned on the first episode of FoL.) In minstrelsy, African Americans were seen as dehumanized caricatures with huge eyeballs and lips that hung open farcically. They were often described in animalistic terms: Their children were called “darky cubs,” and they had “wool,” not hair. Black men were depicted as stupid and lazy, while Black women were hypersexual provocateurs or subservient caretakers. Biracial women were particularly exoticized as titillating and wanton.³⁴ This minstrel legacy echoed throughout Flavor of Love’s three seasons and its many spinoffs.

Flavor Flav (and three seasons of Flavorettes) allowed VH1 to profit from the revival of these anti-Black stereotypes, just like Stepin Fetchit in the 1930s. Short for “Step’n fetch it,” that was the stage name of Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry, the first Black Hollywood millionaire. Perry became a superstar by playing film’s most famous “lazy, slow-witted, jive-talkin’ ’coon”—also known in his act as “The Laziest Man in the World.”³⁵ Perry’s characterization of African Americans was the subject of ongoing protest by the NAACP, which considered Stepin Fetchit detrimental to the ability of Blacks to be accepted as equal to whites. Seventy-some years later, VH1, Flavor Flav, and his castoffs-turned-D-list-celebs are the ones being called out by culture critics. In Essence, columnist Debra Dickerson pointedly equated the treatment of women of color on Flavor of Love with imagery dating back to slavery:

Where have we seen this before, the forced extraction of a subjugated class’s names to be replaced by demeaning ones; the refinement of the crabs-in-a-barrel gambit in which the oppressed are taught to fight one another; the refusal to allow victims a sense of personhood or privacy by entering their (mass) bedrooms unannounced. . . . ³⁶

Turn Off Channel Zero, a film collaboration by media activists, artists, and musicians, went further, targeting Viacom (parent company of VH1, as well as MTV and BET) for “showing the whole world who they think we are” through programs like Flavor of Love and “using our culture to destroy us.” Professor Griff, another member of Public Enemy, appeared in the film to urge people of color “ to control our own images.” ³⁷

Cocreator Mark Cronin (Mindless Entertainment) insists FoL wasn’t demeaning because Flav “just behaves the way he wants to behave.” Chuck D dismantled this disingenuous claim on PBS. “I blame Viacom and maybe the VH1 station. Flavor is Flavor—he’s been the same dude forever,” he told Tavis Smiley. “But they saw some DNA in there where they said, ‘Wow, we can go into that and we can just mass produce it and just repeat it over and over again.’”

He’s absolutely right. Though Cronin claims that he and coproducer Cris Abrego (51 Pictures) “don’t have a political agenda. We don’t have an exploitation agenda,” they made an intentional choice to give this particular man a dating show specifically because he’d reliably act the fool—and then they cast, edited, and framed women of color in ways that intentionally played off deep-seated racial stereotypes. Like most reality producers, Cronin reverts to a standard media copout: It’s not racist if people enjoy it. “I feel if we do a show that wasn’t controversial or outrageous, then why bother? It’s entertainment. It’s meant to be fun,” he told The Washington Post.³⁸

JEZEBELS, PIMPS, AND THUGS

Flavor of Love heralded a reality TV renaissance in the latter half of the decade. The invisibility, tokenism, and typecasting that marked BF unscripted programming was largely replaced by African Americans headlining cable dating shows (I Love New York, Real Chance of Love, For the Love of Ray J), lifestyle series (The Real Housewives of Atlanta, Let’s Talk About Pep, Fantasia For Real), and faux-“rehab” programs (Charm School, From G’s to Gents, T.I.’s Road to Redemption). Additionally, one dating series centered on an Asian American (A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila). Long-standing series increasingly used racial conflicts as promo tools: In 2008, The Real World heavily hyped a Southern white woman screaming that a cast member shouldn’t “get ghetto” even if she’s from “inner-city . . . Blackville.”³⁹ ^dh

With FoL as the bedrock that spurred these new shows (and with producers like Cronin and Abrego behind many of them), reality TV’s increased racial inclusivity may be more a curse than a blessing. Entire series are now devoted to minstrel archetypes reborn in the name of “reality.” Bravo aired three seasons of The Real Housewives of Orange County and one season of The Real Housewives of New York City—both of which followed only white women—before debuting The Real Housewives of Atlanta in 2007. Focusing on “Black elites,” RHOA shared the “rich women = superficial bitches” frame of RHOC and RHNY. That’s where the similarities end. More than just self-centered and snooty, RHOA’s women were often portrayed as verbally and physically violent. Producers centered race as the unspoken cause for their “low-class,” “ghetto” behavior. The old minstrel “dandy” in a newly gendered context, RHOA implied that all the money in the world couldn’t make rich Black women civilized. And when season 1 castmate DeShawn Snow couldn’t be shoehorned as a dandy or an Angry Black Woman, she was promptly fired.^di

The most prevalent (and profitable) example of post-FoL racial typecasting is the Jezebel. According to this age-old trope, an African American woman is a “seductive temptress with an insatiable and animalistic appetite for sex. Beguiling, voluptuous, lewd and lustful.” During slavery, Black women’s supposed sexual voraciousness was used to rationalize raping female slaves.^dj Vast moral, legal, and constitutional progress has been made in the intervening years, yet the mediated image of Black women as Jezebels has persisted from the 1915 movie Birth of a Nation to 1970s blaxploitation films such as Black Hooker and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song— and finally in contemporary reality television. FoL introduced this caricature to a new generation of viewers, and she has been a staple of both VH1 and MTV programming ever since. While virtually all Black bachelorettes on cable dating shows have been portrayed as “opportunistic, one-dimensional and sexually deviant,” no one has been so more cartoonishly than I Love New York star Tiffany “New York ” Pollard.⁴¹

VH1 gave the rarely fully clothed New York a mansion full of suitors to preside over after she sexed up—and was dumped by—Flavor Flav on FoL’s first and second seasons. As self-proclaimed “Head Bitch in Charge” she divided her time between erotic teasing and emotional torment. Not one I ♡ NY episode went by without New York rubbing up against, stripping for, and making out with numerous guys, whom she alternately seduced, manipulated, and emasculated. In “I Love New York: Does New York Love Me?” a team of scholars noted that Pollard’s “lustful appearance, promiscuous demeanor and manipulative behavior make her the perfect Jezebel for the 21st century,” as everything about her was “a profound exaggeration, from her lengthy highlighted hair weave and thick protracted false eyelashes to the four inch stiletto shoes she dons.” We heard her moan breathily one minute and rant in irate, Sapphire-esque tirades the next, always in getups that revealed as much of her breast implants as allowed on basic cable.⁴²

In Pollard, Cronin and Abrego found not only the ultimate Jezebel, but someone they could position as embodying every trope discussed in chapter 3. In multiple seasons of FoL, I Love New York, New York Goes to Hollywood, and New York Goes to Work, VH1 framed her as:

• a bitchy, backstabbing Angry Black Woman who flies off the handle with little to no provocation;

• a gold digger who’d willingly get into a man’s pants if that’s what it took to get into his wallet; and

• an incompetent idiot who can’t properly pronounce common words, much less hold down a job.^dk

Just like Flavor Flav, Pollard’s “bad Black girl” routine was a cash cow for VH1. With 4.4 million viewers, I ♡ NY ’s 2007 debut was their most watched series premiere ever, and the highest-rated show on all of cable on the day it launched.⁴³ After basing a lucrative franchise on racist mockery of Pollard and fellow Flavorettes, Cronin and Abrego wanted us to believe they really cared about helping women of color improve their lives. So when Pollard’s hormone-soaked dating show wrapped production, they began filming a different kind of series in the mansion they’d rented for her entourage.

Enter Flavor of Love Girls: Charm School, an “etiquette boot camp” for Flav’s disgraced daters. VH1 billed the series as a “real life ‘My Fair Lady,’ [in which] these women will be given the opportunity to transform from a flavor of the month to the ultimate standard in class and sophistication.” Each week the least improved contestant would be voted off the show; the last woman standing would win $50K. Comedian and host Mo’Nique explained the premise in an opening montage:

Once upon a time there were thirteen girls who needed a little help. You see, all of these ladies made the very same, very big mistake: They showed their unruly behavior to the entire world on a little show called Flavor of Love. . . . Some of them won’t admit it, but they need to change their ways. . . . They also needed a mentor to guide them on a path towards self-respect and prosperity . . . these ladies need my help. So I came up with a plan [to] send the Flavor of Love girls to charm school. They’re gonna be taught everything, from how to make a good first impression, proper etiquette, style, and last but not least, how to have healthy relationships.

Under this guise of benevolent “rehabilitation,” the first installment of Charm School reinforced a hideous parade of isms. Viewers learned that women in general are stupid bitches; Black and Latina women are “slutacious” divas with neck-bobbing, finger-snapping attitude always one bad mood away from beating the shit out of white girls; low-income women are ignorant and “ghetto”; overweight women are disgusting and lazy; and Asian women will “love you long time.” (They also all come from the same place. In one episode, Filipina “student” Leilene was alluded to by her fellow housemates as Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.) Oh, and we also learned that women of color are little better than animals: “Another rule, and it’s a shame you gotta say this. There are seven bathrooms in this house. Seven. Don’t nobody shit on my floor,” Mo’Nique commanded.

The Grande Dame of this hypocrisy fest, “Headmistress” Mo’Nique spoke of how Charm School would teach Black women in particular to “gain our respect back” by becoming “cultured” and “classy ladies.”^dl The former Flavorettes had to redeem their tarnished reputations not just for their own benefit, she said, but as representatives of their entire race: “They watching us. They watching us,” she admonished. “Let us make that woman named Harriet Tubman—let’s make her proud. Let’s make that woman named Dorothy Dandridge proud. Let’s make your mother proud. Let’s make your grandmother proud.”

By blaming these women for acting out the roles they were selected to play, Charm School shrewdly deflected responsibility from VH1, Cronin, and Abrego, who carefully crafted these shows to make sport of our culture’s most disturbing beliefs about women of color. In one telling example, Mo’Nique berated the women for their “disgusting nicknames” and, in an elaborate reverse-naming ceremony, threw each woman’s nickname tag into a fireplace. The scene had the air of a cleansing ritual to it, with fake gospel music played in the background as she spouted sanctimonious words about their being “willing to free themselves.” The cynicism that fueled the production of this scene is breathtaking. “Those horrible nicknames” Mo’Nique railed against were the cost of entry into FoL’s cast—it was entirely Flav’s and the producers’ decision to refer to them as childish, sexualized personas rather than actual people. The Flavorettes had no choice in the matter, unless they wanted to quit the show en masse.^dm

Each week focused on a different “lesson,” whose stated goal of empowerment was undermined by subtextual messages. A tutorial supposedly about business acumen involved women using their bodies to sell products. Mo’Nique said a fashion challenge would help them learn how to dress in a dignified way, yet the takeaway was that fat women look “like a bunch of sausages stuffed into a bag” in dresses. Public relations training was just a pretext to bring in New York to insult the “students” in the most hateful ways she could muster—as when she asked a domestic violence survivor “How did you feel after you got your ass beaten? Was it wild animal sex afterwards? Like, what happened after this beat down?”

Speaking of unhealthy relationships, one particularly destructive bit of “education” codified reductive stereotypes about men of color under the guise of teaching contestants how to find higher-caliber men than Flavor Flav. The “teacher” was Tariq Nasheed, author of The Art of Mackin’ and The Art of Gold Digging,^dn who cautioned the women to avoid four types of men: “the players, professionals, pushovers, and parolees.” Pushovers are “92 percent sensitive” and “all about doing whatever you say, catering to your every need,” he explained—as if treating women well is actually a demerit. Parolees are “the thugs, the gangtas, the hustlers. These guys know how to handle themselves in the bedroom; that’s an excitement to women.” Instead of dating any of “the 4Ps,” Nasheed instructed, they should look for the “Urban Renaissance” men who “have swagger, but they’re about their education . . . can be somewhat sensitive but they still got little gangsta in ’em . . . are suave and mentally stimulating like a player, and they know how to satisfy you sexually like a parolee. These are the exceptional men.” They’re also exceptionally elusive, we were told.

If even one viewer’s perception of men, women, or relationships was affected by this twisted definition of what women want and who men are, that would be one too many. The idea that men of color are gangstas—or that gangstas are the only ones who know what they’re doing in the sack—is a time-tested media trope, from the “Super Predator” myths in inaccurate ’80s and ’90s crime journalism to the music industry’s co-optation of hip-hop. For decades, corporate media have pumped out fetishized images of the supposedly Violent Black Male to sell everything from public policies pathologizing youth to sneakers, cars, and Courvoisier.

After Nasheed’s racialized theory of masculinity appeared on Charm School, MTV rolled out two shows dedicated to the notion that Black and Latino men (and low-income white men) are criminals, thugs, and pimps who can only be reformed through the aid of magnanimous reality producers. In 2008 and 2009, From G’s to Gents promised to help gangstas “leave their thug lives behind” and become sophisticated gentlemen, through a Charm School-style format. On the premiere, a Latino “thug” framed the “G” lifestyle for the audience: “Of course I’ve been arrested! Who hasn’t been arrested? I’m from the hood!” A Black finalist in the second season was an actual pimp, whose “ job” was selling women—including his girlfriend. The series offered some positive surface messages, as when a former prisoner’s effort to make a new life for himself was commended, or when low-income men were encouraged not to let their economic status damage their pride or confidence. A frank condemnation of homophobia during season 2 had actual cultural and educational merit. But just like Charm School, the show’s structure and master narrative reinforced more racist archetypes than it exposed. “Eloquence” lessons played to classic stereotypes of men of color as inarticulate coons, while “etiquette” classes evoked the dandy whose ethnicity disqualifies him from upper-crust acceptance. The significance of such messages was ignored by “Gentlemen’s Club” leader/host Fonzworth Bentley, a musician and former assistant to Sean “P. Diddy” Combs. On the season 1 reunion, Bentley described From G’s to Gents as more than “ just a TV show,” but a force that transformed the men and “changed the lives of everyone that’s watching.” Similarly high-minded claims were attached to 2009’s T.I.’s Road to Redemption, in which African American rapper T.I., convicted on felony gun charges, spends his last forty-five days before sentencing telling youth (again, mostly of color) to avoid a life of crime.^do

Beware reality shows promising self-improvement and cultural change—especially those produced by the same teams that traffic in minstrel mayhem and “skankertainment.” When Mo’Nique mused about her high hopes for “her sisters” to “take the spirit of Charm School” and improve their daily lives, viewers got to feel all warm and fuzzy. And sure, just like FGs2Gs, a few positive ideas did come through. Yet if VH1 had truly intended to combat the bold bigotry and misogyny of FoL and I ♡ NY, they wouldn’t have reassembled the Charm School brood in a reunion show that resembled The Jerry Springer Show, with a live audience cheering as the women cursed and fought. “It breaks my heart,” Mo’Nique said sternly, “to see . . . beautiful Black women sit up here and degrade and demean and disrespect each other as if you’re animals.”

THE “LARGE CONTEXT”

Sorry, that just doesn’t fly. No matter how hard Cronin and his cronies flee accountability, entertainment always exists in a larger cultural and commercial context. As Mark Anthony Neal, author of Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic told The Washington Post, “The problem isn’t Flavor Flav. . . . The problem is Flavor Flav becomes the stand-in for the one or two black people you see on TV,” and therefore “takes on more importance than he should.”⁴⁶

With networks reducing scripted programming to make room for cheaper reality fare, far fewer roles exist for actors of color now than a decade ago, when twenty-six new shows in ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox’s 1999-2000 lineup didn’t feature even one character of color in a leading role. The NAACP threatened to boycott the broadcasters over this “massive whiteout.” Flash forward to December 2008, when a follow-up NAACP study found that the number of actors of color in regular or recurring roles on scripted series actually decreased on CBS, NBC, and Fox, with only ABC making progress toward more diverse casting. During the 2008-2009 season, when Entertainment Weekly called the broadcast nets’ fourteen new shows “alarmingly pale,” noting that “the only minority character anchoring a new series on the Big Five networks” was Cleveland Brown, a Black cartoon figure voiced by a white actor.^dp Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans were significantly underrepresented across all scripted programming, a trend that worsened with the recent cancellation of minority-led series such as Ugly Betty, Girlfriends, and Everybody Hates Chris. Available roles for women are also shrinking, and actresses of color continue to be cast mostly as maids, hookers, drug addicts, assault victims, and “sassy” token friends.⁴⁷

This “whiteout” persists when viewers flip from scripted to news programming. As Extra! magazine has repeatedly documented, people of color are disproportionately underrepresented as experts and subjects of broadcast journalism—while being overrepresented in crime reporting. Women, more than half the population, are also drastically marginalized as newsmakers, composing just 14 percent of guests on the broadcast networks’ influential Sunday morning debate shows and 17 percent of hosts and cohosts of nighttime news programs on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox.⁴⁸

Behind the scenes, as we’ll see in chapter 8, white men remain the vast majority of writers, creators, directors, and producers of media content and decision-making executives and owners of media companies. With just a small handful of women and minorities—and even fewer women of color—in clout positions within the media industry, those whose communities are most affected by offensive or inaccurate news and entertainment have little influence over its production and scant power to green-light more positive, diverse, and compelling programming.

Just as the Jezebel mythology had dire consequences for the lives and safety of Black women during and following slavery, such depictions in contemporary reality television have social consequences. As reality shows are some of the only places viewers regularly see people of color on TV, their imagery takes on greater significance. When the primary televised narratives about race and gender are Jezebels, Mammies, and Sapphires, “spicy” Latinas and “exotic” (or passive) Asians, our collective cultural understanding of who women of color “are”—what they’re capable of intellectually and professionally and how they should be treated socially and sexually—becomes poisoned. Likewise when men of color appear mostly as buffoons, thugs, and criminals.

Pop culture portrayals can influence self-perceptions, public perceptions, and even legislation about people of color, as K. Sue Jewell argues in From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond: Cultural Images and the Shaping of U.S. Social Policy.⁵⁰ Women of color are still paid less than all other (legal) workers, face continued discrimination in business and politics, and suffer dramatic rates of sexual assault and domestic violence, while men of color are disproportionately targeted by the criminal justice and prison systems.⁵¹ Dehumanization within reality television only serves to exacerbate these social problems by reinforcing notions of people of color as inarticulate, immoral, lazy, and violent.

The Genesis of Reality TV Racism

**I. Before Flavor of Love (BF): Marginalization, Tokenism, and Typecasting**

IT’S A NICE DAY FOR A WHITE WEDDING

THE BLACK BITCH (A.K.A. THE ENTITLED DIVA)

THE MAMMY: “IF THEY’RE NOT HAPPY, I’M NOT HAPPY.”

SILENT NATIVES, NOISY GONGS

BEAUTY “CORRECTION”

II. After Flavor of Love (AF): Modern-Day Minstrel Shows

JEZEBELS, PIMPS, AND THUGS

THE “LARGE CONTEXT”