How Reality TV affects real life for black women

Black women in the media, especially in reality TV, tend to be typecasted into the ‘angry black woman’ box. The issue with this typecast is that it can trickle into real life occurrences and affect how black women act in real life – as they can begin to feel as though they need to be that ‘angry black woman’ to be noticed or seen. One major example for this is the show ‘Baddies’ on a streaming service known as Zeus Network.

This show, first aired in 2021, features a group of young women of varying races and ethnicities (mainly black women), who all live together and attend promotional events. The downside of this reality show is that smoking and drinking is permitted, which usually results in a lot of violence.

 The show has had mixed reviews for quite some years, with some saying that it’s “a bunch of grown women screaming over each other”, and others absolutely loving the drama. In my opinion, the show allows for a harmful representation of black women to now be perceived as how they act in real life – and can affect how young black women (its main viewing audience) think they need to act in their day to day-life.

Shows like these allow negative stereotypes like the ‘angry black woman’ and ‘the jezebel’, to stay alive in a modern-day society. When many black women are trying to break free from the depictions that the media has of them, reality TV shows such as Baddies and rapper Blueface’s - real name Johnathan Jamall Michael porter - show Blue’s Girls Club, pigeonhole these women straight back in.

Blue Girls Club involved a group of women living in one house, along with Blueface, for 21 days. Unlike other shows of the same premise, there was no cash prize or anything to win from being on the show. Instead, they would be building their social media presence. However, the show, watched on platforms like OnlyFans, was very traumatising for some of the contestants who told reporters that there often wasn’t food, only copious amounts of alcohol, and the doors were all unlocked including women’s bedrooms and bathrooms. The security, who also doubled as the show’s producers, would encourage the girls to fight, and so many incidents occurred that within the first 72 hours of the show a contestant had broken her leg, and another had lost a tooth.

Reney, another contestant from the show, told reporters that she didn’t get the exposure she was promised as she didn’t take her clothes off and ‘shake her butt’ as much as the other contestants. When shows promote vulgar behaviour like this, and weaponize it against these women (by not giving her the social media presence she deserved), it normalises the internalised lack of sense that women might have within themselves that may make them feel as though they need to degrade themselves or speak more with their body than their minds to truly be heard.

This then goes onto affect young viewers who may not know to differentiate what’s real from what’s being shown on TV. Body image issues then increase, and more spells of violence are seen from the youth – especially in the US but not excluding the UK whatsoever – with the excuse for fighting typically being ‘I was standing up for myself’. This links heavily into the ‘adultification’ of young black girls, a bias that affects girls as young as five years old and shows how they have a ‘need’ to act older than their age. This perception is unfortunately not just handed to them by society, but by authority like their parents too.

Bottom line is, these stereotypes will continue to stay embedded in society as long as the industry continues to make reality TV unfortunately. Instead of trying to change that problem, it’s now down to society itself to see us as separate from what’s on their televisions.