A Very Kind & Very Colorblind Bachelor Nation
A Black Eyed Story
My mother knew her worth. She knew it was priceless – so priceless it was dangerous. Treacherous to keep, so wanted. A hazard. My mother knew her worth. She knew it was so leaden with beauty it was almost too impractical to warrant keeping. She knew that it was the world’s fear of this beauty, its craven-want of something so melanated that made her worth worthless. Mocha, brown butter, chocolate chip, cocoa, lava cake, double fudge, triple espresso, Hershey bar, chocolate-dipped—delicious. Empty calories of wanting.
“They will not see you,” she would repeatedly tell me.
This is how I watch The Bachelor. I look for all the melanism dotting the great room of the Bachelor mansion to my very own soundtrack playing on repeat: They will not see you. They will not see you. They will not see you. Based on this, I guess which brown sugar baby will make it to the Fantasy Suites. I’ve never seen one make it any further.
The summer before I entered seventh grade, my mother asked me if I had any “little friends.” I smiled coyly, wanting to seem wanted. “Oh you do, miss thang?” she teased. “What’s his name?”
I lied: “Brian Trisnar.” Her face scrunched into a surprised, cautious confusion: “That’s a White boy, ain’t it?” I nodded as she slowly shook her head. “They will not see you,” my mother said. “They will want you. But they will not see you.”
Years later I called my mother and told her all about the precise moment I met the man who would become my husband, Simon. She asked, “That’s a White boy, ain’t it?” I simply answered, “He sees me.”
This story is the very definition of a Black Eyed Story: a Black mother knowing her worth, knowing her daughter’s worth and yet knowing that an unready world will be so overwhelmed by our worth, so befuddled with what to do with this caché of worth—richer and sweeter than a vat of Godiva chocolate truffles wrapped in gold—that it will label it worthless. This is what people do when they can’t possess the thing that will not have them. They will lie on it. Call it trash. They will insist they never wanted it anyway – though they can’t stop thinking about it.
For many White Americans this is the conundrum. Black is undeniably beautiful. Yet no matter what, they can never own what makes Blackness so intrinsically beautiful. Even when they enslaved Black bodies, it couldn’t extract our beauty. They couldn’t tap it like a maple tree and bottle it like syrup.
My mother didn’t want me to settle for being consumed. She wanted me to want to be seen without offering up my worth on the auction block. She knew White Americans would bid on such a glorious thing only to take it home, dissect it, try on bits of it, and then throw it all away after finding out they could never fit it to themselves.
But let’s skip over the many Brian Trisnars whom my pre-teen heart believed wanted me. My mother was right, they would not see me.
Skip over all my White-boy crushes who would not see me, and skip over every joyous Black boy love-of-my-life. They too could not see me – something my mother had not warned me about until I divorced my first husband. Then she said, “Oh yes, I forget about them. They will not see you, baby. You’re too dark-skinned.”
Skip ahead forty years. I’m watching The Bachelor: The Women Tell All in its 27th season with Zach Shallcross. Three of the 15 women on stage are obviously Black. Two might be Black, but they’re definitely women of color. None of them made it to the Fantasy Suites.
One of them, named Charity, made it all the way to Hometown Visits. She brought Zach to a family BBQ with her Black mom, Black dad, Black brother, a few White girlfriends and one Black girlfriend… and yet not one of them ever mentioned race. They were in Columbia, Georgia—the deep South. Yet the fact that she’s Black and he’s White—and the added layer of complications and difficulties that come with that—never once came up. Charity just repeated over and over again to her family and friends, “He makes me feel seen.” I couldn’t help but notice that not once did her mother gently remind her, “Baby girl, they will not see you.”
Later that week when Zach sent her home, he told her:
“I know you don't want to hear this from me but you deserve all the love and I couldn't give it to you.”
He walked her out and she tearfully climbed into the chauffeured car, confused.
Riding alone in the backseat, she repeated his last words to herself and whispered, “What does that mean?” I wanted to explain things to her just as my mother had explained things to me. Neither he nor she could see that Zach had been colorblind right up until that very moment. He wanted Charity, but he could not truly see the real Charity until faced with spending an intimate night alone with her—without cameras—in the Fantasy Suites. Ironically, colorblindness has a hard time suspending disbelief when faced with reality. Ironically, it doesn’t pair well with fantasies.
Earlier in the season, I worried about Charity. Sometimes, I wanted her to blink twice or to side-eye the camera to let me know she understood the micro-aggressions that so casually played out on the show.
There was that group date when she got the rose and she said to her co-dates, “I really feel like I just needed validation so I’m just really happy.” And then this exchange happened:
Christina (a White blond woman): Ummm I’m just confused.
Charity: I’m sorry what? Did I say something wrong?
Christina: You did not but honestly I’m mad that it wasn’t me. I mean, duh.
And Charity melted into tears.
A week or so later, Charity finally got her one-on-one date with Zach. But just before they got ready to leave, Kat (White with blond highlights) asked Zach if he could step away with her. She then took him off to a private corner and kissed him.
In case you don’t get it, let me just recap it for you one more time: Charity, the only dark-skinned Black woman in the group, got picked to go on a coveted one-on-one date with Zach. He came to pick her up and this woman Kat insisted on having a private moment with Zach just before he went out on a date with another woman. She didn’t bother to ask Charity if it was okay with her. She just told him what she wanted. Of course, he obliged. She grabbed his hand, took him to a secluded corner, and made out with him before he went on a date with another woman—again, the only dark-skinned Black woman cast on the show. And this blonde White woman branded this White man with her lip gloss, hot and glistening, smack dab on his lips!!!
They will not see you, Charity! They will not see you.
For the whole entire scene Charity said nothing, just sat looking hurt and awkward. Neither Kat nor Zach bothered to apologize. The next day, Charity somewhat confronted Kat. But when another girl named Brooklyn (also White and blond) jumped in and asked Kat if she would have done the same thing to another girl in the house (and remember every other girl is either very light-skinned or White) Kat stormed off feeling attacked. So fragile.
Listen. The one true thing about Bachelor Nation is its awkward and indeed terrible handling of race. It’s as clueless as the rest of America. Black contestants have shared disturbing experiences they’ve had on the show, and a couple of Black male try-outs sued for discrimination when they weren’t cast. But those incidents barely made a rumble because kind and gentle colorblindness can’t decipher any racist behavior that’s systemic or subtle. It can only see the white-hood-and-burning-cross kind of racism which Bachelor Nation is also guilty of: one contestant defended her classmate’s blackface performance on social media; another contestant posed for a clothing brand that also made White Lives Matter gear emblazoned with the Confederate flag; and the first and only Black Bachelor ended up choosing a girl who attended her sorority’s annual Antebellum plantation-themed ball. She also repeatedly liked then President Trump’s racist and xenophobic posts.
How did Bachelor Nation handle these more explicit biases and out-right racially aggressive behaviors? They put their best face forward and did a performative racial reconciliation song and dance. They then followed that up with a White allyship, soft-shoe, soft-sell tap dance: they cast their first Black bachelor and their first dark-skinned Black bachelorette.
If you haven’t guessed, Charity will be the next bachelorette. It’s no surprise. She’s that rare kind of Bachelor Nation girl – the kind that’s so pretty that America almost forgets she’s a Black girl. She has the right nose, lips and hair texture. And even more, she’s “poised and articulate”, two so-called compliments that White people only pay to Black people they don’t see as Black. On The Bachelor, the Black women who fit this mold never come undone. Never yack it up. Their demeanors are as silky smooth as their silk presses. I think they must be the most exhausted women on the show. It’s hard work to make sure you’re seen but also unseen. Charity did this well. When she learned the news that she would be the next bachelorette, she tearfully looked into the cameras and said:
“I can’t wait to show little girls that look like me that to be in a position like this is possible. I know that I will be making a lot of people proud.”
But I hope there will be Black mothers out there who will tell these little girls the truth: they will not see you, so know your worth.
Gorgeous and gutting and wise, as always. Thank you, Marcie.
“Kind and gentle color blindness can’t decipher any racist behavior that is systemic or subtle.” How perfectly captured. How insidiously true. 💔