Do Black women really misbehave all that badly on reality
television? I’m a reality TV aficionado and I’ve been noticing a lot of black
women being critical of other black women who appear on reality television.
Most vocal is Iyanla Vanzant, who won the NAACP Image Award for Best Reality
Show for Iyanla: Fix My Life. Ms.
Vanzant frequently behaves in the same fashion as the very women whose lives
she claims to fix. Vanzant’s series gets it kick from produced digging,
probing, and the creation of disorders for guests. Iyanla asks the same blanket
questions each episode and morphs the responses into a disorder for each guest.
Many times, she diagnoses her guests as angry black women, or women with bad
behavior. Even as she calls her guests nasty, vile, guttersnipe, bitches with
conviction, Iyanla presents herself as a being of higher moral and spiritual caliber.
As a former fan of Ms. Vanzant’s show Fix
My Life, I watched her reach deeper and deeper for reality television
moments in recent years. I remember watching Fix My Life when it first came on the air and I was pleased and
excited by the concept of an educated spiritual leader helping those who need
it most. As years have passed, I no longer watch for Ms Vanzant, but to hear
from her guests and see how she responds to them.
Over the past three recent seasons
of her show, Iyanla has made it her duty to highlight the bad behavior of black
women, coming off as judgmental and often downright nasty. The first red flag
was an episode with Karreuche Tran, ex-girlfriend of Chris Brown. Iyanla
pressed Tran repeatedly to blame her dysfunctional relationship with Chris
Brown on her relationship with her father. It was apparent to Karreuche and
both the viewer that Iyanla was working hard to make a show. When Karreche’s
managers threatened to pull the plug on the show, Iyanla backed off and took
the interview in a different direction. That’s when I realized that Fix My Life was just another talk show,
presented under Iyanla’s guise of spiritual healing and self help.
As I
continued to watch, I witnessed each episode move further away from helping the
guests toward exploiting them. The hardest episode to watch was the recent
episode with Neffe, Keyshia Cole’s sister. Iyanla called Neffe out of her name
on so many occasions that I thought Neffe was well within her rights to snap on
Iyanla. She didn’t though. After each commercial break, Iyanla reminded us of
Neffe’s “bad behavior” on reality television. Shortly after reminding us of
Neffe’s behavior, Iyanla reffered to her as a “nasty bitch”. When Neffe became
offended, Iyanla added “vile,” “guttersnipe,” and “from the hood” to that bitch
she had just called her. This is the point when I felt that I had to put out
something into the universe in defense of Neffe and all other black women on
reality television. I watched Neffe on Keyshia Cole’s reality show and the
spinoff Frankie and Neffe. Neffe’s “bad behavior” was her inability to deal
with her mother and sister’s in an effective way. Why is that bad behavior, Ms.
Vanzant? Isn’t that exactly why we are supposed to watch shows like Fix My Life, so that we can learn how to
cope with out struggles. Neffe was not acting out for television, she was
acting out of pain and hurt that had been long overlooked because she lived in
poverty. Yes, Neffe is “from the hood’ as many African-Americans are. That
doesn’t mean that every person “from the hood” is a nasty bitch. Furthermore,
if the behavior is so nasty and vile, why does Iyanla seek to exploit the very
same behavior that is so undesirable.
I say this to anyone who wants to dog
black women on reality television: Watch five minutes of Mob Wives, any of the Real
Housewives franchise, especially the Beverly Hills and Orange County franchises. Yes, the affluent Beverly Hills and
Orange County housewives, regularly use vulgar language such as the C-Word,
accuse each other of drug abuse, and have even become physically violent on
many occasions. When your done watching them, turn to Teen Mom, where white
teen pregnancy is just the backdrop for other issues such as drug abuse,
pornography, and violence. The truth is, we can stop bashing black women for
their behavior on reality television, it’s part of the business. The real
reality is, these women have parlayed the platform into successful careers and
black women shouldn’t be held to a standard that doesn’t exist for anyone. More
importantly, other black women or men shouldn’t be the ones creating this
standard!
I wholeheartedly agree with you. I used to clammer for Mob Wives and they are (if not more) violent! The finger is always pointed as AA women to act a certain way or say a certain thing. It's ridiculous how we are always labeled the angriest or most violent. I see reports about how we look but no word on how nasty and criminally minded other shows are. Especially when their husbands are in jail for those criminal and violent activities. Or hell they are. Those teen moms get arrested way more than some of the other women on say Basketball wives or real housewives. Bye Iyanla!!!! ππΎππΎππΎππΎ
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