Dear Iyanla, you are not helping! AT ALL!

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!