Category: Entertainment

On The Magic Of The Black Muslim Girl Experience

Originally published for Nylon Magazine.

In Islamic theology, there is the concept of the Jinn—beings born of a “smokeless” fire in another dimension, beyond human but with the same frailties; neither inherently good nor bad, with a fiendish streak that is documented not just in the Holy Quran but in Hadith, and just as capable of salvation or damnation as the rest of us. Of the five kinds of Jinn—Marid, Effrit, Ghoul, Sila, Vetala—the Sila are considered to be one of the rarest, typified by a seductive feminine energy and shapeshifting capability. Continue reading →

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YesJulz Is the Latest Example of the Problem With Voluntourism

Originally published for Broadly.

In 2018, the scales on which we weigh morality have begun to slowly shift. Many of its detractors have derisively tried to attribute the change to the rise of “call-out culture” or “cancel culture,” but the reality is that the rubric of what defines goodwill is no longer limited to intent. Power imbalances, agency, and execution are all critical factors for assessing the merit of any charitable effort, and social media has increasingly empowered the groups whose spaces are being infringed upon to continuously hold people accountable on those merits.

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Charmed’ Taught Fans About Love and Gender Roles in this Classic Episode

Originally published for Broadly.

“Cold Takes” is a column in which we express our passionate beliefs about insignificant events and Internet discourses at least several months too late.

From 1998 to 2006, the world got to know a trio of sister witches, known as “Charmed Ones”— Piper, Phoebe, and Prue Halliwell (and later their half-sister Paige after Prue’s untimely passing) — the most powerful forces of good of all time. An immediate hit for The WB network, millions flocked to the show —myself included— to watch three single women in their twenties engage in self-exploration and rediscovery of familial bonds while kicking ass and taking names. Continue reading →

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Afropunk’s Owners Get Real About the Festival’s Growth, Recent Controversies

Originally published for The Root.

For Matthew Morgan and Jocelyn Cooper, it has been a long, 15-year journey to get the Afropunk Festival from the small, local hangout for passionate message-board friends in the alt-punk space congregating in Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn, NY, to the internationally renowned entertainment juggernaut it is today.

Borne out of a titular documentary exploring a “subculture within a subculture,” Afropunk has expanded well beyond the original source material, becoming more inclusive of the nuances of alternative black spaces as the years have progressed. But with rapid growth comes criticism—and in recent years the festival has withstood a fair amount, from pushback over the rapidly rising ticket prices for admission to dismay over the perceived erasure of the punk fanbase it was created to serve to rumblings of an increasing nonblack presence.

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This growing friction between the paradox of “punk” and commercialism has been an ongoing conversation for Cooper and Morgan, which they have worked to address year after year, as they continue to cement themselves as the ambassadors of an independent black media company with a large global imprint.

“I think there’s a misconception that we are not-for-profit,” says Morgan, who co-founded the current iteration of the festival with Cooper in 2009 (prior to that, Morgan had collaborated with James Spooner, the creator of the Afropunk documentary, in what was known as the “AfroPunk Music and Film Festival”). “Although we worked in the last few years with local authorities and the mayor’s office and the local government, we are a for-profit business and we were a for-profit business even when we were free.”

“If you pick any two acts, headliners in a direct support of any of the four stages and you put those together, you cannot see two acts for the price that we have,” Morgan further clarifies. “We are still the cheapest festival in America, and we do that because it’s more important for us to have a black audience that pays for a ticket that supports their culture and enables us to have black people in marketing, editorial, sales, sponsorship. It creates a business that is for the community. That employs the community.”

Despite the relative affordability of tickets, the uptick over the years is still unmistakable, going from a previously “free” (with donations requested) event to most recently charging $60 per day, for the two-day festival. However, Afropunk Brooklyn has had a continued partnership with Chip’N in the Earn A Ticket program, which provides the opportunity for Brooklyn residents to get a free day pass in exchange for a set amount of volunteer hours. According to Cooper and Morgan, approximately 20 percent of all tickets were earned tickets this year.

With regards to the punk legacy of the festival, both Morgan and Cooper admit that they’ve veered beyond the confines of the source material envisioned by film creator James Spooner, but resist being confined to its initial definitions as their brand continues to grow.

“In 2007, 2008, I think I started to expand the definitions and not be locked into what traditional punk rock dictates because we’re already outside of those lines, so why did we have to work things that were already not for us? Why weren’t we supposed to create our own space? And that also means that, for me, the music genre is not important. It’s about the attitude, it’s about the people, it’s about the resistance, it’s about resisting in a place that is normally not associated with people of color,” Morgan says.

Morgan also draws onto his own background as to why he felt compelled to expand the musical offerings:

“I love an audience of 250, 300 people … but if I kept going down that road, I said that we would miss the people like myself. The kids that lived in the projects, like where I grew up, not what people write about but where people actually live can grow up and form community, friendship. I would miss those kids because the music would tell them that it wasn’t for them, as opposed to being an inviting place that had all types of music, therefore would bring different types of black people. So I think it’s not for me about when the decision was made about the genre of music. It was a position to bring more black people in than to exclude.”

Despite the expansion into other genres, they continue to book punk artists, and claim to book more traditional punk bands (11 this year) than any other major festivals, including artists such as the Fever 333 and Black Pantera from Brazil.

“We create alternative marketing materials solely for the punk bands so people are more aware that they exist,” Morgan says. “And the way that they’re described between the other bands is done so people go for Yuna and see the Fever 333, and that is what we do. It’s what we’ve always done. If people are new to what we’re doing, then my assumption is that they don’t know the history and they’re joining now too … which is fine. We welcome that.”

As to the social media buzz of an increasing nonblack presence in recent years, Cooper adamantly states, “This is not true. Come to the festival, you’d see,” adding that there were arguably more white attendees when the festival was still held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Morgan adds that the highest possible concentration—which, they both emphasize, is still not high—may be in the VIP section where the sponsors, band managers and special guest lists are: “The reality is that we have more agents and we have bigger bands and if anyone can tell me how we tell the bands with their white agents and their white friends and their white bandmates and their white girlfriends and parents that they can’t come to the festival … tell me how to do that without coming across like a bigot,” Morgan says.

This year’s festival was punctuated with a viral incident in which Ebony Donnely and his partner Ericka Hart claimed they were removed from the VIP section by security on Morgan’s orders for wearing a T-shirt noting that “Afropunk Sold Out For White Consumption.” In his own words, Morgan gave his own accounting of the incident, contributing it to a disappointing miscommunication:

“I walk up to three people after scanning who went backstage and I said, ‘Interesting shirt,’ or, ‘What’s that shirt?’ Unbeknownst to me, they had been taken backstage by our film crew to do an interview, which they did. And our film crew gave Ebony backstage a marker, and backstage, Ebony wrote on the shirt. I don’t know what selling out for white consumption is and I was actually interested in what that was, but I commented on the shirt and then I asked for what credentials do you have and I was told, and in my English [Morgan is from England], I was told to mind my own business and I think, in American, it was ‘why are you asking so many questions?’ The amount of conversation about the T-shirt was perhaps three seconds. We then went on to talk about the credentials. When they basically told me to mind my own business, I asked the security. They asked me what was going on, and I said—this is where the ‘my house’ thing comes up—I said, ‘Back here is my house. You can do whatever you want outside but you don’t have the right credentials to go backstage. You have to go.’

“Other people were being asked to leave backstage. It’s not a VIP as I’ve read. It’s not an area for uninvited guest. It’s a backstage working talent area. I noticed Erica. I said, ‘Erica.’ And she said, ‘You know me.’ And she said, ‘Yeah, I know you,’ and that was kind of how the interaction went. It was very, very short. They were escorted out. Erica asked me, ‘Are we being kicked out the festival?’ I said, ‘Absolutely not. Just not backstage,’ and they were escorted from backstage to the entrance of backstage and they went on their way.”

Morgan adds that the removal had nothing to do with the T-shirt, noting that prior to the incident, he had a lengthy and productive exchange with someone else who had a shirt stating “Make AfroPunk Free Again” without conflict. It was in this spirit of discourse that Morgan and Cooper invited Donnely and Hart to their Solution Sessions podcast, which they chose to decline.

Cooper took direct issue with the implications of the shirt itself, highlighting the impact of Afropunk in the black community in Brooklyn and abroad.

“We have supported 250 black businesses in our market,” she says, from food businesses, to homemade earring designers to organizations that have built schools in Ghana—in addition to a fully black, live-event production company. To Cooper, the greater objective of Afropunk is to create an ecosystem of a self-sustaining dollars within the black community and its diasporas, a concept that would directly counter any notion of white consumption.

“I just looked at an impact study that we helped to generate to the city of Johannesburg almost a hundred million Rand (approximately 6.6 million USD) worth of business that we brought into that city in our first year. We’re just getting started,” she says.

On the heels of this discord also lies some internal tensions made public by longtime editor-in-chief of Afropunk.com, Lou Constant-Desportes, who announced he had stepped down in a Facebook post that claimed the “philosophy and actions of some of the people who run the company are so at odds with the values that they claim to stand for.”

From Morgan and Cooper’s end, they both lamented the loss of a beloved family member from their team, indicating that bringing on Emil Wilbekin as chief content officer and Constant-Desportes’ new boss to expand their editorial vertical approximately six weeks ago may have contributed to the situation. (The Root has reached out to Constant-Desportes for comment).

Afropunk is rapidly expanding with no signs of slowing down—this year’s officially reported attendance numbers for Afropunk Brooklyn was 25,000 people a day. Next year will be the inaugural Afropunk Brazil, which will officially place the black-owned festival in four continents, with teams and offices being built in each of the other corresponding locations—Brooklyn, Atlanta, London, Paris and Johannesburg.

Concurrently, both Cooper and Morgan are eager to expand their reach into other branches of entertainment—expanding their podcasting efforts with an upcoming partnership with the HowStuffWorks network, as well as looking to undertake a few film projects. By all estimations, their dream of a fully realized digital media company is within arm’s reach—but as their network continues to expand, the dialogue of reconciling seemingly conflicting legacies of capitalistic enterprise with their punk ethos and an enmeshed association with black activism and empowerment will likely be a continuing one. On their end, they are prepared to have it—just tune into their next Solution Sessions. As Morgan puts it, “we’re able to do more when we can finance the revolution.”

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Couple Thrown Out of Afropunk for Protest T-Shirt Questioning Festival’s Inclusivity, Eroding Punk Nature

Originally published for The Root.

It has been an oft-repeated refrain that the Afropunk Festival has changed from the punk-centered origins of its inception in the early 2000s—evolving well beyond the brainchild of James Spooner’s titular documentary to a festival powerhouse, with presence in three continents and five cites. Continue reading →

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Who Gets To Claim Their Identity In France?

Originally published for Buzzfeed News.

Atop Paris’s famous Champ de Mars gardens lies its even more prominent Eiffel Tower — a gargantuan lattice ironwork that millions of people from around the world flock to visit annually. Like all landmarks of cosmopolitan cities, the site is picturesque, nostalgic, and crowded — the hustle and bustle of citizens and visitors alike, colliding daily. About 15 yards from the main entrance, you’ll see a row of young men, largely of African descent, aiming to make as much money as they can from passersby, selling anything from mini Eiffel Towers to French flag pins. At the end of their day, some will pack up and take the Metro past the Périphérique to the banlieues; from the ritzy city center where they spend their day to the isolated, low-income suburb enclaves of mainly black and brown people who have been denied significant mobility or opportunity, the cité tower blocks in the shadows of the shimmering lights of the notoriously low-lying city.

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‘Dear White People’ Creator Justin Simien Takes On The Alt-Right & Fake News In Bold New Season [Interview]

Originally published for Okayplayer.

Shamira Ibrahim spoke with the talented Dear White People creator, Justin Simien, about the show’s new themes, technology, race and more.

The premiere of the Dear White People Netflix series in 2017 was met with a barrage of accusations of “anti-whiteness,” reverse racism and calls for its cancellation, a bewildering phenomenon that seemed reflective of the passing of the baton into a new sociopolitical era, both in the U.S. Government as well as in the never-ending misinformation wars persistently fought on social media. Season 2 of the show, premiering on May 4, tackles this transition head-on, using its characters as mirrors into the myriad of ways we both willingly and unwittingly participate in the outrage culture hamster wheel that seems to have exploded since the 2016 elections.

Over the course of 10 episodes, the lead characters confront these new challenges — internet trolls, the rise of “white nationalism,” doxxing, free speech on college campuses, and internal debates within their black community as to the next steps to take to combat the looming spectre of white supremacy in their daily interactions — while continuing to reconcile the inherent exploration that is urbane to everyone’s coming-of-age college years. At the core of it all remain young adults who are still trying to figure out what scene they belong to and how to navigate their individualism while feeling beholden to the interests of a collective college housing experience that is being encroached upon by the influx of white classmates.

Okayplayer had the pleasure of speaking with writer and director Justin Simien about the unique themes expressed in this season, and the choices made to advance the conversation on the interactions of technology and race in season 2. One thing was made clear about the ethos of this season: the tools used may be different, but the tactics that entrap the restless fervor of the discourse being had by young black people—both on campus and online—remain the same.

‘Dear White People’ Creator Justin Simien Takes On The Alt-Right & Fake News In Bold New Season [Interview]

Okayplayer: You start the season where we left off, focusing on the after-effects of the final conflict. Did you guys know where you wanted to take the series when you finished the inaugural season?

Justin Simien: I had a few ideas about it, but really, it was the response to Season One. I felt a sense of urgency for Season Two that I didn’t feel until Trump won the day we wrapped season one — not just the negative response to our first press materials, but a desire to create a false sense of outrage among people. They really made people believe that an anti-white show was coming to Netflix, which is crazy because as many times as I say it to myself – Dear White People — I cannot figure out what is so threatening about those three words together.

My head was spinning after season one — why do these conversations get away from us so easily? The answer was always amnesia. There was always this sort of desire to erase the personal history of people in this country. It’s kind of an obsession, actually. That common phrase, ‘Just get over it,’ is very entrenched in our country’s racial dialogue, from the days right after slaves are newly released — ‘get over it, you’re free, what do you have to complain about now’ — all the way until today.

As long as there is a percentage of the population that is purposely ill-informed about race, we can’t ever really have a meaningful dialogue that doesn’t get out of control. You see that’s the way that misinformation works. You see the architects of it. You can look at it through a historical lens, and I just kind of became obsessed with all those little secret histories that this country contains that affect our everyday lives. I became fascinated by that.

OKP: The first season really focused on a more liberally informed racism in the kind of elite environments many of us exist in. In this season, it really seems to draw out the open bigotry we seem to have transitioned into. What made you take that direction?

JS: It was literally what all of us in the room were going through. People who obviously associate me with the show said some vicious things to some of my writers, but literally, any black person on Twitter who regularly talks about these issues publicly has felt the change in culture, has felt the divisiveness, has felt the way in which people are almost addicted to the outrage. It’s like we get together just to get outraged as opposed to having a meaningful conversation. It would feel odd not to talk about it and not to include it in the fabric of these characters’ lives because this is exactly the bullshit they would be dealing with if they were real and if Winchester was real.

OKP: Speaking of outrage and everything that comes with it, the show also leans into the cult of personality borne from the zeitgeist of response. It can really create a whole platform all on its own. What conversations were you all having in the writers room while fleshing those components out?

JS: It’s a whole industry. Every time one of these poor kids gets shot, you’re going to see the news cameras, you’re going to see the competing liberal versus conservative spin, you’re going to hear from the NRA… all this advertising money is being made off of the death of somebody. That money doesn’t go to the family. It doesn’t help them psychologically repair. It doesn’t help the community gather around the issue, and there are very few consequences for the perpetrators of these crimes.

There was this feeling that it was another part of this system. When we talk about racism in Dear White People, racism is defined as an institutional thing. We’re talking about disadvantages though when it feels like every time something happens, it sort of happens in the same way, that, to us, was a key that this is systemic. Our system is actually made to work in this way. I brought a couple of books into the room, one of which was The History of White People, which was just a mind-boggling read, but also, makes you realize just how arbitrarily we landed on this idea that whiteness means anything at all, let alone it being the standard of beauty. I just really wanted to explore that.

We looked into secret societies, which to me is an extension of this need to kind of always erase the past or hide our tracks. It felt like the same thing. Fake news, propaganda, trolls, it just felt like the same cast of characters since the Reformation era. That’s what I want people to understand, beyond just making you love the characters and having a lot of fun. I want you to leave the show curious, like, what other secret histories do I not know about? There’s a few. You never see it. They leave you quite upset when you start to look into it.

 

OKP: Another prominent theme is the continuing examination of navigating queer identity through Lionel’s character. What did you guys want to draw out in that storyline this season?

JS: I wanted to write very specifically about being a gay person who’s also black, but also grew up without a father — that’s Lionel, that’s me — and he doesn’t really know how to be in the world. A lot of characters in TV shows, once they come out, their story is sort of over. They come out and they immediately find a boyfriend, and everything’s great. I just thought that was a kind of cruel fiction for all of the rest of us who are like, ‘Well, that didn’t happen to me.’ I wanted to show Lionel’s continuing awkward walk in that life.

One of the things that strike me about being gay is how queerness is separated into these different groups in the same way that races are and in the same way that within the black community there are all these tiers of colorism and sexism. To be both is just such a mind fuck. I wanted to walk people through that, in a non-sitcom-y way, where he just goes to a party and meets the love of his life. It’s not that simple. Even as you go through the series, the love of his life may not be the love of his life.

That’s what my experience is. I remember coming out and just literally never feeling the way everybody else in the club seems to be feeling, which is, they found their mecca, they found their thing. I never felt that way. I was never treated that way. I was never hit on in L.A. clubs. It never happened. It’s sort of like, I just wanted to show what that felt like and what it continues to feel like for queer people and queer people of color.

OKP: In that storyline, popular personalities Kid Fury and Todrick Hall have guest features. How was it like working with them?

JS: They’re so lovely. The funny thing is, like, I’m such a big fan of them but they were treating me like I was a thing. They were nervous and humble and I was like, ‘Wait, but you guys are stars in my head.’ Todrick [Hall] came so prepared. Kid [Fury], God, he just broke my heart. I just loved their performances. What I think came out was a really funny scene.

They were wonderful and I just thought they killed every take and really great to work with. I also thought because Todrick has been pulled into some of these problematic, pop star debates, and gained the ire of both black and white people. I just thought, what a fun way to just say ‘Eff you’ to all of it — including him, literally the center of a conversation like that and bring some levity to it because they’re pop stars. This is not that serious.

‘Dear White People’ Creator Justin Simien Takes On The Alt-Right & Fake News In Bold New Season [Interview]

The point of the scene is to show Lionel what gay black men look like and how intimidating that can feel. Boy, did they pull that off! You know what I think it is, I think that we are so often excluded from narratives that when we get to create our own, we become so exclusive and I just wanted to show how that feels to the outsider, like Lionel, who could probably be these guys’ friend but no one knows that right now because we’re all so intimidated of each other. We’re all so scared of each other. Even when he walks in they pause and sort of have to. I thought that would be a fun, entertaining way to look at ourselves.

OKP: In both seasons, the focal narrative was around the use of technology to spread information and how that can get distorted. In the first season, that was more so with the app and the Facebook invite; this season, it’s social media and how news can get distorted. What do you think about when you think about this show and going further? How would you like to advance the conversation and how we have used technology to more access but with certain amounts of pitfalls?

JS: I think I’d like to continue in the line of thinking that I’ve begun, which is, why is this sort of erasing of the truth such a seemingly necessary component to advance in this country? We’re essentially giving our lives over to algorithms that we’ve now been able to statistically prove are actually racist. In very real ways, the nuances of people who happen to be of color, there’s no space for that in these algorithms because nobody of color wrote the algorithms and so nobody could see what was missing from them.

For everything from faucets not being able to register black skin in a bathroom to sort of lumping certain kinds of cultural answers together and drawing inaccurate conclusions about people and that effects purchasing and advertising decisions and all kinds of things that have a lot of other things they’re sort of connected to.

I’d like to continue to explore that. We do have this thing in our country where when a new thing happens, there are all these forces that we just sort of allow to kind of sweep up whatever hedge up happens so that we can no longer talk about it or even properly remember it. That will always kind of be a theme that I think recurs, but I’m very interested in exploring, well, okay, given we are so distracted and given we are so woefully misinformed, what does a successful network of people look like? What does coming together even mean anymore? What does a meaningful dialogue mean? What is the work that it takes to move a social needle?

‘Dear White People’ Creator Justin Simien Takes On The Alt-Right & Fake News In Bold New Season [Interview]

Is it actually possible? Are these things that happen to happen when these people are forming a group or when those people are forming a group? Or, are there things that we can actually affect? I think a lot of us are mad and we are looking at the culture around us and we are exasperated and what we want to know is, what is step one and then what is step two? I think what I want to see is characters going through those steps in some really concrete ways. I’m curious to see what that might look like.

At the same token, these are young people in a very formative experience and I was very reactive when I was at that age. You’d never catch me coming back junior year the same way I was rocking sophomore year. I’m also really interested in seeing how the event of the first two seasons sort of effect the characters in terms of their own self-expression and how they position themselves in this world.

I think someone like Sam, who’s been trying the same thing for a while now and getting disappointing results, I wonder if she’s going to be so quick to get on that same horse again or if she’s going to try something new? That’s where my first sort of thoughts go because I want to see the characters grow and change and respond over time. I never want you to feel like any season of the show is just a kind of warmed up version of the previous season. I’d rather it fail miserably but be different and look like human life, which is always changing, than sort of stay the same.

Dear White People Vol. 2 is available for binge-watching and streaming on Netflix now.

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Yeah, I’m Finished With The Black Suffering Trauma Porn Of Orange Is The New Black

Originally published for VerySmartBrothas.

Warning: For those of you who do things like have lives and stuff and haven’t gotten around to watching the latest season of this Netflix show, spoilers ahead.

Last Friday, Netflix dropped the latest season of Orange is The New Black, the critically-acclaimed dramedy of life in a minimum-security prison centered around Piper “I Didn’t Know I Couldn’t Do That” Chapman and her rag-tag group of incarcerated friends; all of whom seem doomed to a life of eternal malaise that the central character somehow is just not possessed with.

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Did Afropunk Lose Its Punk Roots?

Originally published for VerySmartBrothas.

This weekend, a sea of unapologetic blackness will descend upon Fort Greene’s Commodore Barry Park for Brooklyn, N.Y.’s 12th Annual Afropunk Fest. Instagram feeds and Twitter hashtags everywhere will be peppered with twist-outs and bold prints; your favorite vibe curator will inevitably make a thread of the best of the best of the audience’s fabulous crochets and Afrocentric jewelry. For 48 hours, Snapchat stories will be dominated by a time capsule of what the festival organizers have described on their home page as “a day of live music and good vibes.”

It’s clear to anyone with a pulse on black digital media that the zeitgeist is currently led by celebrations of “peak melanin,” “unapologetic blackness” and branded T-shirts to match; it stands to reason that Afropunk is an organic extension of this branch of cultural exultation. However, the Afropunk of 2017 is a far cry from the inaugural gathering of 2005—not to mention the namesake 2003 documentary by James Spooner that was the inception of it all. In little over a decade, the event has gone from a donation-only gathering to a $55-per-day festival with notable sponsorship from international brands such as Toyota, Coors Light and Red Bull.

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Transition, of course, is natural. That said, in the wake of this evolution seems to lie the rubble of the original core fan base that Afropunk was conceived to service: a cultural niche that grew out of a film whose original intended title was “The Rock and Roll Nigger Experience.” How does that fan base feel about the current iteration of this space? And what conversations should we be having about the trade-offs between demographic integrity and mainstream appeal?

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The Bachelor Franchise Fails In Addressing Race and Consent

When ABC announced that they were selecting the first ever Black Bachelorette, several questions presented themselves. Some of those questions have already been answered , such as “what does that mean for the racial makeup of the contestants?” (The season ended up featuring more Black male contestants than ever before). However, one question continued to linger throughout the season like a precarious guillotine: will the Bachelor franchise make an attempt to address race in America, and if so, how? Presently, the answer is “not really, and when applicable, horribly.”

Discussions around racism in the Bachelorette have been largely constrained to the farcically portrayed machinations of the season’s clear villain in country singer Lee Garrett, with the production team choosing to inexplicably keep Rachel isolated from the inner details of the situation while simultaneously treating the racist behavior with the gravity of a comical B-plot, forcing the Black male contestants to endure a series of microagressions at a near nauseating clip. In a methodical fashion, Lee invents tensions between several other black male competitors, branding them with the label “aggressive” when challenged, all with a malicious twinkle in his eye. When forced to contend with the historical context of a white man inflammatorily referring to a black male as aggressive, Lee dismisses the conversation by invoking the insulting allegation of a “race card”, a statement which came on the heels of derisively referring to black male contestant Kenny as a “stack of bleeding muscle” in the course of an argument. All of this is relayed to Rachel by Lee in a rather disturbing contortion of narratives; Lee portrays himself as an affable possessor of Southern genteel who is unjustly left at the mercy of the Black contestants’ violent inclinations.

Consuming all of this as a black woman has been a tough pill to swallow. Racism-as-entertainment-value commodifies centuries of pain and dilutes it down to the potency of a supreme annoyance, a conceit that is highly insulting to both the viewers as well as Lindsay, who becomes an unknowing accomplice in continuing the storyline as a result of being excluded from the context of Garrett’s scheming. In a landmark season during a time period where the gravity of the lived racial experience is as relevant as ever, ABC’s choice to dismiss nuance in favor of encouraging race-based gaslighting for ratings  has left a sour taste in my mouth for the past 3 weeks.

This series of events has dovetailed into the latest burgeoning scandal of the Bachelorette’s salacious  sister show, Bachelor in Paradise, whose latest season was intended to feature early-exit black male contestant Demario Jackson from Rachel’s season. However, taping was abruptly stopped approximately 3 days in for investigation of a potential sexual assault that may have occurred while filming, which, as more details were leaked, were revealed to stem from an incident between Demario and former Bachelor contestant Corinne Olympios. Over the course of the investigation, it was concluded that no sufficient cause for sexual assault; however neither Jackson nor Olympios will be returning to the show while the network “plans to implement certain changes to the show’s policies and procedures to enhance and further ensure the safety of all participants.”

The looming spectre over the entire series of events is, of course the very real and pained history of black men being falsely accused, imprisoned, and even murdered for being perceived as sexually domineering towards white women. This is a narrative that America is not all that removed from, and remains a consistent fear in many black men’s lives, as Demario has since stated in his first public interview since taping was halted. That lens cannot be ignored – black men, and black people in general are so rarely given the benefit of the doubt when attesting to their innocence or humanity, that the optics alone warrant a critical examination of the circumstances.

However, with the rights of  Jackson to be absolved come the rights of the victim to due diligence. The facts remain that Olympios was not the one to lodge any complaint about alleged misconduct during taping(and as of this moment, has yet to accuse Jackson of sexual assault), as it was two producers; couple that with Jackson’s own admission that Olympios was cut off from alcohol the next day and competing narratives from other contestants both on and off the record, and the circumstances warranted a proper investigation. There shouldn’t be any stigma surrounding thoroughness; however with ABC Studios and Warner Bros choosing to defer detailing any context around the circumstances, viewers of the show are instead forced to fill in the blanks to their own personal inclinations, doing a disservice to both Jackson and Olympios. For some, this means that the empirically pernicious context of black male and white women sexual interactions supersedes all; for others, it’s the reality that in modern-day justice systems and public opinion there is little to no value in falsifying accusations.

As a viewer who is not just black but also a female survivor of sexual assault, the overlapping of circumstances such as these immediately detail just how ill-prepared the Bachelor franchise was to handle complex issues of race and consent in advance of their landmark season. For a show that trades in the hazy magic of alcohol-fueled hookups, there seems to have been no clear plan in ensuring that all participants had unambiguous guidelines on what affirmative consent really means. Instead we are forced to deal with the weight of alleged sexual assault as a titillating storyline that leaves more questions than answers: if Demario felt uncomfortable immediately when Corinne made advances to the point of needing to engage in the sexual acts on camera, why did he proceed? If the unnamed sources of the crew were put off by Corinne’s inebriation in the moment, why wasn’t filming stopped immediately instead of 48 hours later? What procedures and policies are the studio ultimately reviewing if no misconduct was found? Why is the tape not being released? In a presumed effort to both protect the studios from liability as well as regroup the narrative construction in light of recent events, frank discussions about the topics of race, alcohol, and consent are lacking, ultimately doing a disservice to both Olympios and Jackson, who have their public lives excoriated without much to show for it.

I can’t say in good conscience that I plan on watching the upcoming season of BIP. Barring sincere engagement on the multiple layers of my identity – black, woman, sexual assault survivor – I’m not interested in participating in the ratings spectacle of scandal without substantively deconstructing the root of why these threads are so readily available to pull. Both black people and assault survivors deserve more than that. Peddling pain as entertainment fodder leaves everyone worse off, and if the show plans to substantively move forwards with a seemingly more diverse and multifaceted pool of Bachelors, Bachelorettes, and contestants, it would be well-served to treat critical issues as more than tools to prop up story narratives.

Posted on by Shamira 0