True Story: What Reality TV Says about Us

by Danielle J. Lindemann

Then there are the white spaces. As we’ve seen, although there are people of color on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, these remain essentially “white shows.” As Amy Kaufman has pointed out, it took fifteen years for the producers to cast an African American lead. Between 2009 and 2012 there were no Black women on the show, and there were no Black male contestants on The Bachelorette between 2009 and 2011. In other years, there were only a few Black contestants. “We always had to cast a black girl or two,” a former producer of the show told Kaufman. “It was very obvious to me that it was token.”11 This reflects racial homophily in dating practices, as I’ve argued, but it also reflects how both our population and the reality TV world remain broadly stratified. During the first Black Bachelorette’s season, former Bachelor contestant Leah Block tweeted, “I’m sitting here watching @BacheloretteABC and my roommate just sat down on the couch and said, ‘What is this? @LoveAndHipHop?’ DEAD.”12 Leah’s post reflects the reality that Black people are often confined to these “ratchet” arenas. Further, the tweet captures more broadly the dissonance created when Black bodies move into predominantly white spaces—physical, mental, and social. Historically, we’ve seen this in the furor over school desegregation and “white flight” from racially mixed urban areas into the suburbs. The implicit question: What is this person doing here, in this space generally reserved for white people?