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Performing Race in Flavor of Love and The Bachelor Rachel E. Dubrofsky & Antoine Hardy

Using the reality TV (RTV) shows Flavor of Love and The Bachelor, we ask how the space of RTV is raced. Might the use of surveillance footage and reliance on notions of authenticity create a space where people constructed as a certain race are privileged? Are the qualities valorized in a participant on a White-centered show*comfort with being under surveillance, appearance of not performing*aligned with discourses of Whiteness? How, then, to understand the construction on Flavor of Love of participants self- consciously claiming and performing an identity? We argue that while it is true Flavor of Love animates racial stereotypes, it also allows for fluid and complex understandings of Black identity through active claiming of identities*in contrast to the restrictive naturalized White identities presented on The Bachelor. As RTV shows emerge featuring people of color, it will be the critics’ responsibility to identify if RTV becomes a Televisual ghetto where only certain performances of race are allowed or if RTV can be a space where diverse conceptions of race are animated. Scholarship on RTV needs to find new ways to express the complexity of surveillance and notions of authenticity as they intersect in the display of raced identities.

Keywords: Whiteness; Blackness; Surveillance; Reality TV; Performance; Flavor of Love, The Bachelor

Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution - Routledge] At: 17:48 23 March 2010 Ghetto is as ghetto does, but where I live in the ghetto there aren’t too many White girls up in there being all ghetto like that. I can’t really figure out if that shit is real or not. (Darra ‘‘Like Dat’’ Boyd, Season two, Flavor of Love). Since the success of the first season of Survivor on CBS in 1999, contemporary reality TV (RTV) has become a mainstay of prime-time television programming.

Rachel E. Dubrofsky, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor and Antoine Hardy a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida. Email: [email protected]. The authors thank Debby Dubrofsky for her incredibly attentive editing and support, Kent A. Ono for his wonderful insights, Mark Orbe for his feedback and support, two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions, and Lorenzo Hardy, Robin Boylorn, and Keysha Williams for their insight, support, and feedback. Correspondence to: Rachel E. Dubrofsky, Department of Communication, University of South Florida, 4202 E. Fowler Avenue, CIS 1040, Tampa, FL 33620-7800, USA; Email: [email protected]

ISSN 1529-5036 (print)/ISSN 1479-5809 (online) # 2008 National Communication Association DOI: 10.1080/15295030802327774 374 R. E. Dubrofsky and A. Hardy Scholars have taken note, producing a rich body of work on the topic. A remarkable aspect of the genre is the fostering of unprecedented racial diversity on the smallscreen. Accordingly, the topic of race on RTV is attracting increasing attention from scholars, although this is limited to how race figures in predominantly White shows: The Bachelor (Dubrofsky, 2006), Real World (Kraszewski, 2004; Orbe, 1998; Orbe & Hopson, 2002; Orbe, Warren & Cornwell, 2001; Schroeder, 2006), Road Rules (Andrejevic & Colby, 2006), America’s Most Wanted (Derosia, 2002); Survivor (Delisle, 2003; Hubbard & Mathers, 2004; Vrooman, 2003), and The Amazing Race (Harvey, 2006). In the last two years, hip-hop’s cultural and corporate cache´ (Neal, 1997, 2002; Ogunnaike, 2006; Watts, 1997) has cross-pollinated the RTV genre with Black1 hip- hop programming such as The Ultimate Hustler, Making the Band, The Way It Is, Soul of a Man, Welcome to Hollyhood, The Salt-N-Pepa Show, Gotti’s Way, Life in the Fab Lane, Run’s House, and the series that is the focus of this article, Flavor of Love. The paucity of scholarship on these programs may be due to their varied commercial success compared to major network shows and to their newness, since it can take several years for scholarship to emerge. This article adds to the discussion of race and RTV but focuses on the subgenre of romance in VHI’s Black-centerd show Flavor of Love. As a critical counterpoint, we use ABC’s The Bachelor, a longer-standing show often considered the prototype of Flavor of Love. Like many RTV scholars, we are interested in notions of authenticity, surveillance and the ‘‘real,’’ but we also look at how these intersect with discourses of Blackness and Whiteness. Gray (2005) insists discussions of race look at how the television industry governs representations of Black bodies and constructs race in a particular way, reminding us that television representations of Blackness inform the way our culture engages race. We ask, what are the ways the space of RTV governs Black bodies? How might the demands of RTV*the use of surveillance footage and the reliance on notions of authenticity*create a space where certain racial performances are privileged?

Race and Ghetto While we see race as a social, cultural construct, not a biological fact determinative Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution - Routledge] At: 17:48 23 March 2010 of behavior, we understand race to be both fluid and grounded in contextual experiential realities often connected to physical bodies. As Hyun Yi Kang (2002) suggests, scholarship must not reduce race to bodies when dealing with a visual medium, so as to trouble understandings of racial categories. However, we need to keep in mind that ‘‘what matters ... is the illusion of human bodies’’ (Hyun Yi Kang, p. 99). At times, we base our noting of race on visible racial markers, which is necessary to address the social construction of race in media culture. In noting race, we also include participants’ comments about their ethnic background. While both shows feature multiracial casts, The Bachelor centers Whiteness, and Flavor of Love Blackness. Though we analyze both series, we explicitly center Flavor of Love and Blackness, as one of the authors has published several articles on The Performing Race in Flavor of Love and The Bachelor 375 Bachelor (Dubrofsky, 2007; Dubrofsky, in press), including one on The Bachelor and race (Dubrofsky, 2006); we discuss The Bachelor and Whiteness only to articulate the complexities of Flavor of Love and Blackness. Flavor of Love is often referred to in the popular press as the ‘‘ghetto’’ version of The Bachelor (Barney, 2006). The increasing use of the word ‘‘ghetto’’ to signify Blackness reflects the crossover of hip-hop culture’s use of this term into mainstream culture (Smith, 1997). ‘‘Ghetto’’ can be deployed as a label for allegedly dysfunctional behavior (hypersexual, uncouth, criminal, violent, loud) and values (nontraditional family values, materialism) of Black people from urban neighborhoods. Conversely, ‘‘ghetto’’ can articulate pride in struggle, creativity, and the ability to survive amidst economic and criminal dysfunction (Daniels, 2007; Forman, 2000; George, 1992; Kelley, 1997; Watkins, 1998). ‘‘Ghetto’’ is used on Flavor of Love to engage in a self-referential process of ‘‘naming’’2 (Burke, 1950), activating an aesthetic that proudly affirms a Black identity authenticated by poor urban roots (George, 1992; Keeling, 2003; Kelley, 1994, 1997; Neal, 2002, 2006; Watkins, 1998); performance of ghetto as a dysfunction is thus conflated with its performance as a signifier of Black pride. We are not interested in race as a stable and immutable category, but rather in how the shows construct race: who is conceived of as White, who as a person of color, and the consequences of these conceptions within the space of the show.

The Real, the Authentic, and the Performative As Kilborn (2003) notes, reality on television is ‘‘shaped and offered for sale like any other consumer product’’ (p. 65), and contingent on many factors, including context (Delisle, 2003; Dubrofsky, 2007). We do not assume there is a true, essential ‘‘real’’ or ‘‘authentic’’ that can be accessed. Hereafter, we will not put the words ‘‘real’’ and ‘‘authentic’’ in quotation marks, but they should be understood as such to mark their instability. We take as a premise that what happens on a RTV show is similar to what occurs on a scripted show, with the difference that the raw material creating the fiction of the RTV series is footage of real people doing real things: the magic happens in the Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution - Routledge] At: 17:48 23 March 2010 editing room, through the decisions of producers and TV workers (Delisle, 2003; Dubrofsky, 2006; Kraszewski, 2004). Though RTV features real people as the stars, the events are ‘‘essentially Televisual production’’ (Kilborn, 2003, p. 74), with participants producing identities in line with ‘‘the logic and rules sanctioned by the show’s producers and director’’ (Andrejevic & Colby, 2006, pp. 197Á198). Participants on RTV shows perform for the camera, either unwittingly or explicitly, just as people perform in their daily lives to suit the imperatives of a given situation (Goffman, 1958; Hill, 2005). We are interested in how the space of a RTV show constructs participants as performing or not performing, not in assessing if participants are performing or not. We view all behavior as performance. 376 R. E. Dubrofsky and A. Hardy The Black-chelor Flavor of Love has a Black star and predominantly Black cast but self-consciously acknowledges its appropriation of The Bachelor, a series with a White star and predominantly White cast. In the first episode of the first season, Flavor Flav (hereafter ‘‘Flavor’’) tells viewers, ‘‘I know many of you have seen that show The Bachelor, but Flavor is the Black-chelor!’’ Flavor of Love and The Bachelor are very different shows with different budgets, appearing on networks with different mandates catering to different audiences. However, the shows represent how race is distributed in the Televisual world. Flavor of Love is the only version of a love story3 about Black people in the RTV landscape, which exhibits what Projansky and Ono (1999) call ‘‘strategic Whiteness:’’ recentering Whiteness without calling explicit attention to this fact. While it is true that more diversity exists on the smallscreen than ever before, especially with the advent of RTV, it is also true that the landscape of television centers Whiteness by featuring White-centered shows on the major networks with the most money and shows about people of color on smaller cable networks.4 In this landscape, we contend Flavor of Love enacts the Black tradition of ‘‘appropriation’’ (Gates, 1989), creating boundaries in relation to the dominant form (The Bachelor) to produce authentic Black cultural spaces (Johnson, 2003; Langellier, 2003).

The Shows The popularity of the shows is significant in locating them as important cultural products. The Bachelor is one of the earliest contemporary RTV shows*one of the original shows focusing on romance and the most enduring of these.5 Since it first aired in March 2002, ABC has broadcast an average of two seasons a year, now totaling eleven seasons, with a scheduled twelfth season for early 2008. The show engendered three seasons of a spin-off, The Bachelorette, with plans for a fourth season in 2008. The Bachelor has proved its mettle through consistent ratings (even when low, ratings have always been respectable), with viewership ebbing and flowing between 7.9 and 16.7 million viewers (Azote, 2006; Oldenburg, 2004; Patsuris, 2004; Roccio & Rogers, 2007; Rogers, 2006). In 2006, Flavor of Love became one of the highest rated television shows in cable Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution - Routledge] At: 17:48 23 March 2010 history (Martin, 2006), attracting over six million viewers for the season finale of season one (Ogunnaike, 2006). The second season, airing in late 2006, garnered 7.5 million viewers for the premiere, shattering its own cable television record (Martin, 2006). While popular in several demographics, the show is a favorite with Black viewers: one in three tuned in to the season finale of season two, making the show the highest rated among Black adults (Pepitas, 2006; Wiltz, 2006) in its time slot. A third season began airing in early 2008. Flavor of Love is the third RTV series for former Public Enemy member and star of The Surreal Life and Strange Love. Flavor of Love spawned three spinoffs: I Love New York; starring former Flavor of Love runner up Tiffany ‘‘New York’’ Pollard; Flavor of Love Charm School, a program ‘‘reforming’’ the past ‘‘dysfunctional’’ Flavor of Love Performing Race in Flavor of Love and The Bachelor 377 contestants; and Rock of Love, a White working-class rock-and-roll-based version of Flavor of Love starring Poison’s Brett Michaels. The aim of The Bachelor and Flavor of Love is similar: help the starring men find the ‘perfect’ woman. On each season of The Bachelor, a man selects one woman from among twenty-five eligible (mostly White) women to be his potential bride. He goes on a series of dates with the women. At the end of each episode, participants are eliminated at a ‘‘rose ceremony’’ during which the bachelor gives a rose to each woman he wants to keep for the next week (the others leave the show), until he makes his final choice. On Flavor of Love, twenty women (mostly Black) vie for the chance to be Flavor’s lady. Flavor submits the women to a battery of tests, after which certain women are granted ‘‘one-on-one time’’ with Flavor so he can assess their potential to be his ‘‘wifey.’’6 At the end of each episode, Flavor rewards the women who pass the tests with a huge golden clock medallion worn around the neck*losers are sent home. Although Flavor has yet to find lasting love, Black women who claim a ghetto identity have an enduring presence in both seasons: winners Hoopz and Deelishis claim this identity by emphasizing their roots in inner-city Detroit and their predilection for violence and confrontation.

Authenticity & Surveillance: Inferential Ethnic Presences Andrejevic and Colby (2006) engage an insightful discussion about race and ghetto identity in Road Rules, a predominantly White cast RTV series. They note how ghetto signifiers are used to authenticate Gladys, a Black woman, as real and Black*thus disqualifying her from the action (Andrejevic & Colby, 2006). When Gladys becomes aggressive and confrontational, she is constructed as authentically ghetto and thus unsuitable for the series. What is key is that ‘‘the reason she had to leave was the reason for her being recruited to the show in the first place’’ (Andrejevic & Colby, 2006, p. 207); she is cast because she personifies ghetto, and eliminated because she performs this role too well. This example gets to the crux of the matter: Gladys is verified as authentically ghetto, therefore authentically Black and an inappropriate participant for long tenure on the series. Thus, ‘‘Gladys confirms that being ‘ghetto’ is no justification for acting Black. She ought to simply Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution - Routledge] At: 17:48 23 March 2010 choose to do what White people do within this reality: Choose to be White’’ (Andrejevic & Colby, 2006, p. 210). Acting White (and middle-class) might secure Gladys a more enduring spot on the series, but therein lies the bind; this would code her as not authentic, as performing an identity. And so the conundrum: White-centered RTV shows seek participants who appear not to be performing but rather comfortably revealing an authentic identity, an often difficult position for Black subjects to occupy in this space. Shohat (1991) insists we look at ‘‘inferential ethnic presences, that is, the various ways in which ethnic cultures penetrate the screen without always literally being represented by ethnic and racial themes or even characters’’ (p. 223). There is an inferential ethnic presence in requirements for subjects in White-centered RTV 378 R. E. Dubrofsky and A. Hardy shows: the normative White subject who iterates through the ideal of appearing to not-perform, of being comfortable under surveillance. Discussions about the intersection of authenticity and surveillance in the space of RTV (outlined shortly) align with how Whiteness is conceived in popular discourse: as a norm, familiar, not strange. Whiteness in popular culture stands for the nonsignification of race, an absence of race, and as such it ‘‘resists any extensive characterization that would allow for the mapping of its contours’’ (Nakayama & Krizek, 1999, p. 88). The privilege of Whiteness is that it couches itself in an absence of explicit signifiers. This is mirrored in the imperative to not-perform on a RTV show, which means an erasure of explicit markers of race, class and background* rather, an erasure of explicit references to these. This reflects Hall’s (2003) notion of ‘‘inferential racism,’’ where racist premises are hard to pin down because they are naturalized and unacknowledged. The unself-consciousness with which Whiteness is performed in popular discourse is mirrored in the unself-consciousness a good RTV participant exhibits under surveillance. The role of surveillance in RTV is a popular topic among scholars (Andrejevic, 2004, 2006; Corner, 2002; Couldry, 2002; Dubrofsky, 2007; Gillespie, 2000; McGrath, 2004; Palmer, 2002; Pecora, 2002). Foucault’s (1995) ideas about the panopticon as a disciplinary mechanism that organizes and monitors individuals while simultaneously classifying them as a particular subject are often cited. Much RTV scholarship argues surveillance is presented as a means of verifying the authenticity (realness) of participants (Andrejevic, 2004; Couldry, 2002): authenticity is verified when participants appear to be themselves despite the highly contrived panoptic nature of the settings in which the action unfolds (Andrejevic, 2004; Couldry, 2002; Gillespie, 2000; Tincknell & Raghuram, 2002). Articulations of the meaning of surveillance on RTV suggest that ‘‘for a growing number of people in contemporary Western society, surveillance has become less a regulative mechanism of authority (either feared as tyrannous or welcomed as protection) than a pluralist path to self-affirmation’’ (Pecora, 2002, p. 348), reflecting the idea that people are comfortable with surveillance and welcome it into their lives as a way of affirming who they are (Andrejevic, 2004; Dubrofsky, 2007). Andrejevic (2002) suggests that part of the work of RTV is to equate surveillance of the self with comfort with oneself and self-knowledge, and with Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution - Routledge] At: 17:48 23 March 2010 normal and real behavior. Participants’ comfort with being on display must translate into a performance of not being on display*behaving exactly as they would if alone; authenticity is measured by one’s ability to remain consistent across disparate social spaces (Dubrofsky, 2007). Hence, being real means acting under surveillance as one would if one were not under surveillance. Participants unable to do this are cast as performing for the camera (Hill, 2007). Kilborn (2003) explains that all RTV participants agree to participate as television performers and that part of this process involves how participants are constructed in relation to performativity: either as performing (not being authentic), or as not-performing (being authentic) (Hill, 2007). Good RTV participants perform not-performing. Performing Race in Flavor of Love and The Bachelor 379 The valorization of surveillance as a tool to affirm self-knowledge and comfort with oneself (Andrejevic, 2002) assumes one is dealing with an identity that need not first be established, an identity that is presumed. As Hill notes in quoting Van Leeuwen, something is perceived to be authentic if it is ‘‘thought to be true to the essence of something, to a revealed truth’’ (Hill, 2005, p. 74). On The Bachelor, the rules of the game are to properly reveal one’s authentic nature under surveillance. The identity of participants need not be spoken or identified; it is always already there, ready to be revealed, assumed, just like Whiteness. Black identity, on the other hand, must often be actively claimed and affirmed: on Flavor of Love, the requirement is to prove one has an authentic identity and to actively claim it. Actively claiming one’s identity works counterintuitively in the space of White- centered RTV shows, since claiming an identity*explicitly articulating oneself*is associated with performing an identity, which does not fit the imperative to appear as if one is not performing. We argue that the space of the two shows we examine is raced, a space where a particular race is privileged (Dubrofsky, 2006). The ways that participants authenticate themselves under surveillance and become viable participants on The Bachelor privileges a White subject whose race is unseen, unmarked, whereas Flavor of Love privileges a range of Black subjects who can claim a multiplicity of identities* although certain identities are privileged.

Confession & Authenticity The difference in how the trope of confession is used on each series expresses the raced rules that regulate that space. Ferguson (2004) argues that confession takes a unique racialized angle for Black subjects, who are often invited to confess on behalf of their race*generating a subject who confesses racial knowledge of ‘‘otherness’’ (to Whiteness) and speaks a discourse of ‘‘truth’’ about Blacks as a collective (Yancy, 2004). This is a burden not carried by White subjects. Hence, we watch women on The Bachelor confess their feelings about the bachelor, each other, and the process, while the confessions of women on Flavor of Love sometimes address these things but more often monitor the authenticity of other participants. For instance, on season

Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution - Routledge] At: 17:48 23 March 2010 two, Chandra ‘‘Deelishis’’ Davis, Shay ‘‘Buckeey’’ Johnson, and Larissa ‘‘Bootz’’ Hodge use confession time to call out other women for not ‘‘keeping it real,’’ not being ghetto; they become the gatekeepers, confessing the parameters of authenticity for a particular type of Black identity. To put this in perspective, White subjects on The Bachelor are not framed as speaking on behalf of their race. Their authentic identity is not contested: Whiteness and middle-classness is the default authentic identity that need not be actively claimed. It is assumed. The series acts as if color is irrelevant, implying racial differences do not matter (Dubrofsky, 2006), but a survey of the women locates them very clearly as educated, middle-class (Johnston, 2006) and, for the most part, possessing White bodies. Color matters*it grants access to the action and rewards of 380 R. E. Dubrofsky and A. Hardy the series*but is never mentioned. This is the imperative of a space that privileges Whiteness.

Whitened Identities Ethnic markers of certain women of color are made invisible on The Bachelor, Whitening their identity since absence signifies Whiteness. Beltran (2002) uses Jennifer Lopez as an example of racial hybridity: her body (her derriere) can be framed sexually, but her pale skin and middle-class behavior can be framed as White. In RTV, Women of Asian and Hispanic descent are often exemplars of such hybridity. As Dubrofsky (2006) discusses, discourses of exoticism bubble underneath on The Bachelor as the ethnicity of Mary Delgado (Cuban American) is erased in favor of a performance of Whiteness. Mary, who appears on season four and six, is marked consistently on season four (where she is eliminated by the fourth week) by her Cuban ethnicity. However, when she returns on season six, her ethnicity is almost never mentioned and she wins the bachelor’s heart. We do not want to repeat the work of Dubrofsky’s article, but rather to continue the argument: Tessa Horst, winner of season ten of The Bachelor (Dubrofsky’s article covers seasons one through eight only) is Whitened much the same way as Mary. Visually, Tessa appears bi-racial (Caucasian and East Asian American), but her racial heritage is never mentioned on the series. Race is not even addressed when Tessa’s mother appears, though she looks East Asian American (more pronounced East Asian features, visually, than Tessa). As Takagi (1993) and Omi and Takagi (1996) suggest, discourses around race in the United States tend to divide along lines of Black and White, with the experiences of Asian Americans defined in relation to those of other races (Takagi, 1993). As Tuan (1999) contends, Asian Americans are classified as not real Americans and not real Asians, existing in a kind of ethnic vacuum. In addition, Osajima argues (2005) that Asian Americans are constructed as a model minority: an ideal (resembling Whiteness) other minorities should strive to imitate. In other words, there is a fluidity to the category Asian American that fits the presentation of Tessa as not having a racial identity (hence, as White) despite visible racial signifiers.

Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution - Routledge] At: 17:48 23 March 2010 One clue that the series works actively not to forefront Tessa’s ethnicity is that her mother is given no screen time, though mothers are usually the focal point of the hometown visits*suggesting an effort to avoid drawing attention to Tessa’s ethnic background. For instance, on this season, as is typical of the hometown visits, when the bachelor meets Bevin and Danielle’s families (two White women), we see the mothers express their concern about their daughters moving far away and falling in love so quickly. A focal point of the visit with Bevin’s family is Bevin’s mom giving the bachelor and Bevin a painting she made. With Danielle’s family, a central scene is of Danielle’s mother showing the bachelor how to belly-dance. Indeed, the hometown visit with Amber, another White woman on this same episode, is presented as unsatisfying specifically because her parents refuse to meet the bachelor: Amber is Performing Race in Flavor of Love and The Bachelor 381 eliminated at the end of the episode. Not only is the minimal presence of Tessa’s mother surprising, so is the fact that this is not presented as an issue. The series animates the idea that under the best of circumstances (when the bachelor likes a woman of color), race, and potentially racism, is illusory and can be transcended (Crenshaw, 1997). As Dubrofsky articulates (2006), the race of women of color becomes visible if they are eliminated. Not only is race mutable, it is so in ways that privilege Whiteness. This is in contrast to Flavor of Love, where playing up one’s racial identity is encouraged: the nicknames for some participants, such as ‘‘Miss Latin’’ (for a Latin American woman) and ‘‘Red Oyster’’ (for an East Asian American woman) highlight this imperative.

Black Subjects: Surveillance and Authenticity Conceiving of RTV as a space where participants must show their comfort with surveillance assumes the object of the surveilled gaze can become comfortable under this gaze, use it to affirm itself. This not only naturalizes qualities performed successfully virtually exclusively by a White subject in this space, it also imagines a subject that does not view surveillance as working against it. This assumption needs to be troubled to understand how Black subjects are often articulated in the space of RTV.7 For a Black subject, the relationship with surveillance can be uneasy. In discussing surveillance as a law-enforcement mechanism for maintaining order in his work on performativity in the space of RTV, McGrath (2004) notes that ‘‘the impact of this policing voice is not felt evenly; certain bodies can more confidently expect to be believed when they protest their innocence in response to the policing voice’’ (p. 22). Hence, while surveillance is often justified for purposes of crime prevention and criticized as an invasion of privacy, this does not address the experiences of, as McGrath (2004) puts it, a ‘‘Black man under surveillance in the streets of New York or London’’ (p. 23), since the camera targets him in ways that exceed issues of crime prevention and invasion of privacy (McGrath, 2004). Add to this the fact that surveillance is used to verify the authenticity of participants in the space of RTV, and things become complicated*as notions of authenticity are often integral to the construction of Black identity in a White nation (West, 1992). For instance, the desire Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution - Routledge] At: 17:48 23 March 2010 to articulate ‘‘authentic Blackness’’ for many, often middle-class Blacks, is driven by a civil-rights edict to disprove historical racist stereotypes used to define Blackness (Dyson, 2001). Conversely, for some, often working-class Blacks, authenticity is a postcivil rights discourse of defiance and subjectivity which rejects the goals of the Black community and the social opinions of Whites, opting instead for local and specific ideas and goals found in the ‘‘neighborhood they are restricted to’’ (Keeling, 2003, p. 35). We see possible implications of the convergence of surveillance with notions of authenticity in Shugart’s (2006) work on court TV shows. She writes that surveillance frames people of color as individuals who are personally irresponsible, lacking in self control and undisciplined, displaying racial stereotypes that classify their actions as 382 R. E. Dubrofsky and A. Hardy indicative of their race. It is a double-bind: people of color under surveillance have the added burden of speaking for their race, while also, paradoxically, having their predicaments individualized. How, then, to understand the presence of Black subjects in this space when authenticity and performance are tightly intertwined? Johnson (2005) suggests: Blackness does not only reside in the theatrical fantasy of the White imaginary that is then projected onto Black bodies. Nor is Blackness always consciously acted out. It is also the inexpressible yet undeniable racial experience of Black people*the ways in which ‘the living of Blackness’ become material ways of knowing ...The interanimation of Blackness and performance and the tension between Blackness as ‘play’’ and material reality further complicates the notion of what constitutes a Black ‘‘performance’’ and of what playing Black is and what playing Black ain’t. (p. 606). Johnson identifies the complex nature of performing Blackness as more than just a reaction to the demands of White surveillance. Black performativity highlights the slipperiness of ‘‘authentic Blackness’’ and suggests how culturally intrinsic authen- ticity can be to Black performance (Asante, 1998).

Performing Identities The tone of each series conveys its valuation of performativity. The Bachelor tells its story of love with earnest sincerity, devoid of irony or self-consciousness, mirroring the way it portrays its subjects as unselfconsciously and undoubtedly White and middle-class. Flavor of Love, on the other hand, is self-consciously humorous, with over-the-top antics, poking fun at participants through funny graphics,8 fanciful music, and outrageous action.9 We watch as producers humorously subtitle Flavor or Darra ‘‘Like Dat’’ Boyd when they speak in heavy slang-filled dialect. The subtitles suggest that the behavior needs explanation, translation, that it is not natural, foregrounding that the activities are a performance and calling attention to the producers’ intervention to give the action meaning: we are seeing a mediated product. Both shows are excessive, but only Flavor of Love is self-consciously so. The

Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution - Routledge] At: 17:48 23 March 2010 Bachelor maintains a tact of normative nonperformance despite its over-the-top, fairytale notions of romance, heteronormativity, materialism and Whiteness. For instance, though the producers make sure the men on The Bachelor have jewels, designer clothes, sports cars, castles, mansions, and private jets at their disposal, the men are not shown self-consciously performing the role of ideal prince charming but rather as naturally embodying the qualities of a prince charming, easily laying claim to the luxuries inherent to the role. Flavor, on the other hand, is the urban pimp10 (Ogunnaike, 2006), with his audacious outfits, rhyming dialogue (Quinn, 2000, 2004) and horny hijinks (Dickerson, 2006). He is a good man in pimp’s clothes* underneath the pimp lies a heart of gold, but no prince charming. His persona is marked by self-conscious excess and over-the-top behavior. Performing Race in Flavor of Love and The Bachelor 383 The performative aspect of Flavor’s presentation is made clear in season two when New York’s parents come to visit. We watch as New York’s mom, Michelle Patterson, displays her distaste for Flavor. Runner-up on the first season, New York is invited back the second season, where she is again the runner-up, and on both seasons Mrs. Patterson harangues Flavor about his gold teeth and outrageous personality. She asks ‘‘how long does he plan on playing Flavor Flav?’’ and demands to ‘‘see the man, William Drayton.’’ Flavor responds, ‘‘You are seeing William right now, I’ve taken Flavor Flav away from the table.’’ By including this scene, producers call attention to the constructed nature of the star’s identity, conjuring questions about the performative nature of participants and the stability of claims to authenticity. This makes for a different series than The Bachelor, where participants must never enact different identities lest they be labeled mentally unstable (as happens to Lee Ann in season four when fellow-participants accuse her of performing several personalities), become suspect, are accused of inconsistency, or of performing for the camera and camouflaging who they are. Flavor of Love, on the other hand, opens up a space where Flavor can be not only a man looking for love, but also an entertainer and a performer (performing a persona). While ghetto identity can be constraining, the series exceeds that identity and the demand to conform to any single identity. Deelishis animates long-held stereotypes about Black women as unbridled sexual animals who invite physical objectification (Giddings, 1984; Hill-Collins, 2004; hooks, 2004; Jhally, 2007; Morgan, 1999; Neal, 2006, Omolade, 1994; Rose, 1994). Holmes (2006) and Netto (2005) remind us that the 19th-century exploitation in European sideshows of the ‘‘abnormally’’ large posterior of Sarah Bartman, the South African ‘‘Hottentot Venus,’’ set in motion the stereotype of Black women as hypersexual and of this hypersexuality as something to be gazed upon and commodified. We see this on Flavor of Love, fanciful music playing as the screen fills with close-ups of Deelishis’ posterior in too-tight clothing. Deelishis remains in the background until her derrie`re becomes a focus in episode three of season two. Her butt is presented as both excessive (Hill-Collins, 2004; Omolade, 1994; Wallace, 2004) and oversexed. She is the recipient of Flavor’s many sexual attentions (posterior as focal point), and she is shown welcoming and encouraging that attention. However, Deelishis articulates a complex personality: she is not simply a sex object. For Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution - Routledge] At: 17:48 23 March 2010 instance, in many scenes we see her emotionally confessing her deep feelings for Flavor, and in one scene she bonds with Flavor’s children. New York is also presented in complex ways. She animates racial stereotypes about Black women with her body presented as excessive (cast-mates refer to her as a ‘‘drag- queen’’) and behavior that locate her as the stereotypical too strong, aggressive Black women*a typification implying lack of femininity (Giddings, 1984; Wallace, 1979). As well, while New York never claims a ghetto identity, she personifies the loudness and hypersexuality linked to ghetto behavior. New York establishes her role as volatile manipulator and calculating temptress, pitting the women against each other and spouting hilarious put-downs. In episode six of season two, she tells Becky ‘‘Buckwild’’ Johnston ‘‘You look like a fairy 384 R. E. Dubrofsky and A. Hardy princess ... that resides over the pits of Hell.’’ She also makes over-the-top claims of superiority, saying things like ‘‘I don’t apologize because I never make, you know, mistakes.’’ However, the series also shows New York repeatedly confessing devout love for Flavor, proclaiming her affection in a dreamy voice, eyes closed, and fantasizing about their future together. We witness tender moments between Flavor and New York, with Flavor openly appreciating New York’s deep feelings for him and expressing strong feelings for her. New York also shows a vulnerable side when she pleads with her mother to accept that she is in love with Flavor. Though New York’s excessive behavior, emotionality and intensity are presented as the reason for her elimination, these are nonetheless allowed to thrive. In fact, it is her excessive and intense emotions for Flavor that win her favor with him. Conversely, such behavior on The Bachelor *especially the variation in behavior* is sure cause for early elimination and a spectacular fall from grace. Christi on season two, for example, is labeled a ‘‘Fatal Attraction Girl’’ because she reveals such strong feelings for the bachelor. She begins as the perfect match for the bachelor, but when she becomes emotional and displays strong feelings for him, we are led to believe excessive emotion overshadows her good qualities (Dubrofsky, in press). New York, on the other hand, is not shown falling from grace. She is the same from beginning to end: spectacular, excessively emotional, angry, exhibiting over-the top behavior, and consistently highly appealing to Flavor. Indeed, her spectacular performance wins her favor with fans (Denhart, 2006a, b), thus landing her a starring role in her own show, I Love New York. The allowance for women who are excessive is not limited to New York. Some of the most notable examples have to do with bodily functions: in the first episode of season one, a woman drinks too much and vomits copiously and another reveals her love for masturbation; in the first episode of season two, a woman defecates on the floor. Flavor is shown accepting these things, just as he accepts New York. He and fellow cast-mates poke fun at the women and even get angry at them, but ultimately the women are presented as multidimensional, their outrageous actions not the sum of their identity.11

Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution - Routledge] At: 17:48 23 March 2010 Claiming Identities As the earlier Gladys example from Road Rules illustrates, one of the few ways Black participants can appear authentic in the space of RTV is by performing ghetto, though this ensures their tenure on the show will be brief and dramatic. Perhaps the logical offshoot of a paradigm in White-centered RTV shows that consistently situates participants like Gladys as unfit for the space of the show, Flavor of Love provides a predominantly Black space where participants can claim a number of different identities without White as the default identity against which all is measured. Significantly, participants on this show do not reveal an identity (as if it were always- already-there), but claim it, sometimes several at once. While explicitly claiming an identity (one that is not White, since White need not be claimed) immediately Performing Race in Flavor of Love and The Bachelor 385 disqualifies a participant from The Bachelor, on Flavor of Love this is often an integral part of proving authentic identity, a core quality of successful participants. One example of how identity is explicitly claimed on Flavor of Love emerges with Black participant Like Dat, a woman from New Jersey on season two. Like Dat fits the ghetto stereotype: she wears ostentatious clothing, uses heavy slang, exhibits a lack of manners and is prone to arguing. She has pride in being from the ghetto, and repeatedly claims her love for her ‘‘hood.’’ We watch as she praises herself and Flavor for never forgetting where they came from. Identification with a specific background and racial identity is rarely seen on The Bachelor, except in the case of Mary on season four (the season she is eliminated) and with some of the women of color who are banished early on. Like Dat’s ghetto identity is shored up by a focus on her evaluation of Buckwild, a White woman who espouses the same values and attributes (love for her hood, audacious sexy clothing, and heavy slang). We see Like Dat recoil as Buckwild talks to Flavor in heavy ‘‘Black slang’’ and seduces Flavor with erotic dancing. Like Dat tells the camera, ‘‘Ghetto is as ghetto does, but where I live in the ghetto there aren’t too many White girls up in there being all ghetto like that. I can’t really figure out if that shit is real or not.’’ Like Dat situates hip-hop slang and over-the- top behavior as signifiers of ghetto that can only be performed by a Black body. Like Dat inquires about Buckwild’s background and discovers Buckwild is from Rancho Cucamonga, which she states ‘‘ain’t no ghetto ... You can’t be ghetto if you ain’t from the ghetto, you can’t redo that shit.’’ Like Dat’s suspicions are affirmed. We watch as Buckwild’s ghetto voice intermittently disappears and reappears, till she quits the show in frustration with the other participants’ constant questioning of her authenticity. In her departing scene, Buckwild completely loses her ghetto voice and Flavor asks her, angrily and incredulously, where her accent has gone.

Closing Thoughts Readings of race in the space of RTV must recognize the presence and potential influence of racial stereotypes and be mindful of the constraining and pervasive nature of discourses of Whiteness. Some media columnists, media activists, and Black viewers have decried the Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution - Routledge] At: 17:48 23 March 2010 representation of Black women on Flavor of Love as hypersexual and angry, exhibiting the worst characteristics of ghetto behavior. They suggest the series is a 21st century minstrel show (Moody, 2007; Ogunnaike, 2006; Wickman, 2006; Wiltz, 2006). While it is true the series displays some of the worst stereotypes about Blacks, it also opens an interesting space for complex identities to be performed. The imperative to actively claim an identity on Flavor of Love, versus revealing an already established identity on The Bachelor, opens up possibilities for claiming a variety of identities at once; for foregrounding performativity and the constructedness of identities in the space of surveillance; and for complicating the requirement for authenticity in the space of White-centered RTV shows. The Bachelor, by contrast, is a fairly flat text, where most participants are presented as having an already established White and 386 R. E. Dubrofsky and A. Hardy middle-class identity, with little opening in the text to question how these identities are constructed. Molina-Guzman and Valdivia (2004) argue that spaces of hybridity are ‘‘where bodies and identities resist stable categories and meaning is contradictory and historically shifting’’ (p. 214). In such a space, marginalized racial bodies operate as hybrids, a combination of many cultural influences that can perform within the boundaries of accepted Whiteness while attempting to maintain their own racial perspective (Molina-Guzman & Valdivia, 2004). This definition could describe the discursive space of Blackness on Flavor of Love. The women on Flavor of Love often resist normative rules of female behavior valorized on shows like The Bachelor by reifying Black stereotypes of female behavior. The complex space of RTV animates a need for reassessment of performances of Blackness: RTV fosters the proliferation of long-held and pernicious stereotypes of Blacks, yet sometimes allows for complex performances of Blackness not permitted in traditional television programming. Participants on Flavor of Love can embrace their sexuality, show a three-dimensional ‘‘ghetto-girl’’ or ‘‘pimp’’ persona and express a desire for Black love absent in mainstream television. Here, women can sob, fight, laugh, get revenge or reconcile without penalty or overt judgment. However, such performances must adhere to a ‘‘test of authenticity’’ (Hall, 2003) by confessing an ‘‘otherness’’ that invariably ‘‘preserves Whiteness’’ (Shugart, 2007, p. 115). As Gray (1995) points out, Black representations on television must adhere to the standards of middle-class Whiteness or function as a site of difference or otherness. Hence, the excessive sexualized discourse and hyperbolic ghetto attitude is personified as authentically Black and far removed from the normative nature of Whiteness, erecting the parameters of Blackness in the space of RTV. In looking at race in RTV, it is important to interrogate the range of issues managed by participants, as well as the moments of critical resistance to surveillance revealed in the shows: how might performances of race create cultural spaces that work within the dominant ideology? As more RTV shows emerge that feature people of color, it will be the critics’ responsibility to identify if the RTV genre becomes a Televisual ghetto where only certain performances of race are allowed under the omniscient eye of surveillance, or if RTV can be a cultural and Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution - Routledge] At: 17:48 23 March 2010 discursive space where diverse conceptions of race are animated. Scholarship on RTV needs to open up possibilities for articulating how identities in this space are constructed and find new ways to express the complexity of surveillance and notions of authenticity as they intersect in the display of raced identities.

Notes [1] We use the term ‘‘Black’’ rather than ‘‘African American’’ to describe people of African descent residing in the United States. The term ‘‘African American’’ is less specific as it can be applied to African diasporic people throughout the American continents. Performing Race in Flavor of Love and The Bachelor 387 [2] Burke (1950) argues that naming can be creative and disruptive, serving as a behavior guide. Naming does not describe the conditions surrounding people, but reveals the motivations for their actions. [3] Since only two of the 11 couples from The Bachelor remain together, and none from Flavor of Love, it might be more apt to say the shows are about failed love. [4] In recent years, cable television shows starring people of color have had commercial success. See Comedy Central’s Chappelle Show and Mind of Mencia, and MTV’s Run’s House and Making the Band. [5] We do not include longer-standing dating shows (i.e., The Dating Game, Blind Date) in this category. We are interested in romance RTV shows that serialize the activities of participants over time. Dating shows follow the activities of participants in a single episode with no carry- over into the next episode. [6] A term used in Black urban music, ‘‘wifey’’ was coined by the group Next in their 1999 single ‘‘Wifey’’ to emphasize the seriousness of a relationship without the legal commitment. [7] Though we do not have time to explore this in detail, it is important to ask how these practices work for a queer subject or other subjects of color: an Arab subject, for instance, faced with the growing use of racial signifiers to identify them as the ‘‘face of terror’’ which, as Gates (2005) argues, underpins the development of biometric surveillance technologies for US national security purposes; or a female subject, already always on display (Berger, 1977; Walters, 1995), who is held in the popular media to a standard for appearance and behavior and thus at greater risk of transgressing the expectation of meeting the standard. [8] For instance, cartoonish images of a clock ticking often appear when a woman talks for a long time, and when Flavor uses heavy slang, an animated graphic called a ‘‘Flavor-a Lation’’ attempts to decipher his comments. [9] The tasks are often the focus of media controversy as they shore up stereotypes about Blacks: Women cook fried chicken to demonstrate their domestic skills, go to church to connect with Flavor’s mother or swing on a stripper pole. There was also the infamous ‘‘five senses’’ test on season one, where Flavor was blindfolded and used his five senses (licking, fondling, looking, smelling and listening) to decide who was most appealing. [10] Quinn (2000, 2004) notes that the pimp is a hero for rappers, representing a way of life that earns respect and power, a role model for poor Black youth. [11] Perceived inauthenticity about one’s intentions is judged harshly on Flavor of Love. In season one, Schatar ‘‘Hottie’’ Tyler and Brook ‘‘Pumkin’’ Thompson are dismissed for appearing on other reality television shows and not telling Flavor. Cristal Athenea ‘‘Serious’’ Stevenson in season one is eliminated for allegedly trying to use Flavor to spark her modeling career. In season two, Heather ‘‘Krazy’’ Crawford is sent home for being more concerned with igniting her music career than being with Flavor. These violations Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution - Routledge] At: 17:48 23 March 2010 stem from behavior perceived to be inauthentic (pretending to look for love when they really want fame), not from allowing their authentic (and inappropriate for the show) identity to be revealed.

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