In the premiere episode of this year’s much-anticipated season of The Bachelor, Matt James, the first Black man to lead the 19-year-old franchise, has a conversation about race with the show’s since fallen-from-grace host, Chris Harrison. James’s “groundbreaking” casting—propelled, like many of 2020’s long-overdue cultural shifts, by a post–George Floyd sociopolitical reckoning—was, at least in theory, supposed to help the show reframe its approach to representation and diversity.
In James and Harrison’s discussion, which appears to be candid (although arguably, few scenes on reality TV ever are), the former discloses personal concerns about being the first Black Bachelor. A child of an interracial marriage that ended in divorce (James’s father is Black and from Nigeria; his mother is white), the new Bachelor says he’s apprehensive of people with “old-school views,” ostensibly implicating white people who are opposed to interracial dating. But he also says he’s worried about those who want him to choose as his winner a “specific person of a specific race”—a.k.a. Black people who may be rooting for everybody Black. In his own words, James said, he doesn’t want to “piss off” Black people or white people, because he is “both.”
It’s an innocent enough comment, and an understandable one. There’s an unfair burden placed on “firsts”; one can see why James would approach his Bachelor-hood wanting to placate everyone. By expressing this hope, though, James also revealed the kind of Bachelor he didn’t want to be—one who would own up to the social, cultural, and political significance of his decisions on the show. Although James doesn’t propose, now that he’s given his final rose to Rachael Kirkconnell, whose past racist actions have loomed over James’s entire season, James’s tenure and choices on the show will undoubtedly be scrutinized more closely.
James’s biracial personal history does not obscure that in the United States, he will be identified and treated as Black for a multitude of reasons, including how he looks. His presence as the Black Bachelor necessarily inspired the show to include more women of color, notably Black women, than in any season prior—at least at the beginning. (The show also included what’s believed to be its first-ever deaf contestant and cochlear-implant wearer, Abigail Heringer.) But it also became clear early in his season that James’s run as the Bachelor would replicate the same dynamics as previous, whiter seasons. Like those, James’s season still gave noticeably less screen time to its Black contestants—and because of James’s Blackness, the colorism that has always plagued The Bachelor became more visible. Darker-skinned and/or monoracial-presenting Black women were sent home earlier; none even made it to the hometown dating rounds. Brooklyn-based model Chelsea Vaughn, the last one standing, was cut in the rose ceremony right before.
It’s important to emphasize that James, the person, is entitled to choose whomever he likes as his season’s winner. But it’s also crucial to remember that James, the reality TV character, is not only produced, but socially constructed. And these dual versions of James may or may not be in conflict.
While the producers of a show like The Bachelor are known for manipulating footage to construct a narrative, those behind the camera probably didn’t misappropriate James’s initial words on race, or make his most critical decisions for him. James has been a willing participant in the way he’s been portrayed onscreen—as during one particularly damning scene, when James’s estranged father comes to visit him. During the meeting, which is too voyeuristic to be satisfying—even for reality TV—James emphasizes his own respectability against his father’s improprieties. All the while, his dad—whom many believe the show has pegged as a stereotypically absent Black father—appears ambushed by the event. (Aware of the perception of this portrayal, James took to Twitter the night the episode aired to clarify his intentions.) And the producers, presumably, weren’t the only reason James eventually chose Kirkconnell—a woman whose presence on The Bachelor will always involve an asterisk, thanks to a litany of past racist allegations and actions that include attending an antebellum plantation-themed party in 2018.
Kirkconnell’s past will ultimately haunt the legacy of the first Black-led Bachelor season. And no amount of real or performed romantic happiness between her and James will escape a racialized lens—the very thing James wanted to avoid—because of her own actions, and his apparent decision to pardon them. This ending is a fitting cherry on top of the proverbial racist cake that also includes Harrison defending Kirkconnell, minimizing her past actions by saying they’d been weaponized by the “woke police.” In the interview that eventually led to him temporarily stepping away from the show, Harrison also noted that Kirkconnell attended the questionably themed party three years ago, as if that were as far back as the Jim Crow era. All of this was made agonizingly worse because it took place in front of—and at the expense of—Rachel Lindsay, the first Black Bachelorette, who was interviewing Harrison on Extra.
Throughout the season, it became abundantly clear that placing a few Black faces and other faces of color on a historically white structure does not a revolution make. Perhaps if the show’s producers understood that the representation of love has its political consequences—and to a lesser extent, if James had demonstrated more nerve—we might have had a Black love story, a novelty in this franchise. Or at the very least, we might have had an interracial love story that didn’t include white(-passing) people—something still rarely depicted. (To James’s credit, had Serena Pitt not self-eliminated after their hometown date, that might have been a possibility.) In either case, there would be grounds for arguing about the significance of such a season on television.
And so, as James’s season draws to a close, the same question remains: What will bring true change to The Bachelor? The obvious answer is altering the systems and personnel behind the show—the production team and process themselves. Perhaps the show could also be more judicious and daring in the people it chooses to feature, and how they’re portrayed onscreen.
But given that the Bachelor franchise was built to boost idealized, heteronormative, white and white-adjacent people with relatable family structures, the show would need to be entirely uprooted from its very essence in order to become radical. By then, wouldn’t we be watching a different show entirely? And whom would such a show be for?
The unpopular but probably pragmatic stance is that apart from some necessary changes to its production and personnel, The Bachelor should otherwise remain as is. The franchise does, on some level, represent the romantic aspirations of at least a portion of its audience; a franchise that’s lasted over two decades is proof enough of that.
What television studios need to make room for, then, is reality TV stories that depict wholly different types of love featuring a wealth of varied characters. MTV’s evolved rendition of Are You the One?, which in 2019, featured an LGBTQ+ inclusive and sexually fluid cast, and even Netflix’s Love Is Blind format, which potentially limits some initial race, color, and appearance prejudices, both provide a template of shows that have a consciousness of representation built into their makeup. Studios ought to fund and promote these sorts of shows as aggressively as The Bachelor is funded and promoted—and most importantly, give these shows time to develop into juggernauts that can last for decades. The hope is that on such shows, a Black lead would be par for the course, rather than groundbreaking. Now that would be progress.
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