Jennifer Pozner has an interesting piece up at the Daily Beast on the class-action racial discrimination suit against The Bachelor and The Bachelorette.
That calculus has governed casting on The Bachelor since its 2002 debut on ABC. Ten years, one spinoff (The Bachelorette), and 24 seasons later, every star of TV’s oldest reality romance franchise has been white. So were 22 of the 25 hopefuls on The Bachelorette’s Season 8 premiere last week. With that history, it came as no surprise that we heard almost no dialogue from the lone black contestant, Lerone, or that Southern blonde Emily Maynard sent him packing at the end of the episode. (On Twitter, one viewer suggested a #MenOfColorCountdown to see how long the Brazilian grain merchant and Colombian mushroom farmer will last.)
Now, a racial discrimination lawsuit aims to prove that this casting math isn’t only faulty—it’s illegal.
On April 18, two African-American men, Nathaniel Claybrooks and Christopher Johnson, filed a class-action suit alleging that ABC; the shows’ production companies, Warner Horizon, Next Entertainment, NZK Productions; and the shows’ creator, Mike Fleiss, “knowingly, intentionally, and as a matter of corporate policy refused to cast people of color in the role of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette.” The complaint charges that this “intentional scheme” of “deliberate exclusion … underscores the significant barriers that people of color continue to face in the media and the broader marketplace.”
The case rests on the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and claims that producers cannot deny non-white contestants contracts based on “perceived racial biases of members of their television audience or their advertisers.” Of course, as Pozner notes, producers’ fears of audience and advertiser resistance to interracial relationships are probably overblown. While one exec insists it would “destroy the franchise,” these days 83 percent of Americans approve of interracial dating, and Americans of all races seems to have a weakness for truly shitty reality TV–especially if they can relate to it. As TV critic Eric Deggans said, “People of color should have the right to suck, too!”
Joyce Banda, who became 
The Academic Feminist Goes Global: A Conversation with Carolyn Pedwell
1) You are the first “Academic Feminist” located in the UK, which is also my academic home. You are also originally from this side of the Atlantic (born in Canada), and have recently published a chapter in a book on travels in feminist theory. How has your transatlantic experience influenced your work?
Crossing borders and boundaries can sometimes make you more likely to question them. I left Toronto for London 12 years ago to study for an MSc in Gender Studies at the LSE and this was, without doubt, the most significant and transformative event in my academic life so far. The chapter you mention, in which I discuss my own journey towards feminism, is framed around a comment my Grandfather made after finishing Judith Butler’s Precarious Life (which I had bought him for his 83rd birthday): He said that he had to read it twice to take it all in but that, for him, one of the key messages was that ‘often what’s not said is more important than what is.’ This observation seemed to cut to the core, not only of Butler’s complex writing style, but also of the critical impetus of feminist studies itself. Feminist studies is committed to addressing the significance of silences, but also to the interrogation of the underlying power structures which naturalise certain ways of knowing while making others invisible. When I asked my mother why she thought my grandfather, a former pig farmer, continues to be more engaged with issues of difference, equality and social justice than most people I know, she wondered if it had something to do with the fact that his parents (her grandparents) would have had to be very open to difference and change themselves to leave England in their twenties and travel across the Atlantic to make a new life in Canada.
While remaining wary of making an unproblematic connection between migration and an attitude of openness and respect to difference, I couldn’t help wondering whether my Mother’s assessment might also resonate with my own. Moving to the UK two weeks after 9/11 to become immersed in the world of feminist theory made me question just about every border and boundary I knew! In many ways my work on cross-cultural comparisons in feminist theory – my interest in attending to that which such comparisons can leave out, cover over, or move us away from – seems to link quite closely to my Grandfather’s summary of Precarious Life. Perhaps my work has moved in this direction, in part, because my own passage to feminism (a feminism committed to addressing gendered relations of power in their articulation with racism, imperialism, classism and heterosexism) has taken shape through transnational encounters which compelled me to examine what lies beneath the surface, to think reflexively about my own privilege, and to interrogate those ‘truths’ and boundaries that seem most ‘natural’.
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