“The Purely Accidental Lessons Of The First Black ‘Bachelorette’”
“When the Bacheloron is white and most of the candidates are white, what this means is this: If you’re a black candidate, you can be chosen, but first, you have to impress a white Bacheloron and convince that person to, for many weeks in a row, pick you. You cannot go forward without their say-so, because of longstanding structural rules about allocating power that they themselves have followed successfully in order to become powerful in the first place. You have to figure out how to navigate not only their evaluation of your qualities as a person, but also their largely mysterious “gut feelings” and “instincts” and ideas about “compatibility” and “fit” and so forth. Only by navigating that white Bacheloron’s decision-making correctly can you, as a black candidate, obtain power yourself by being chosen. So to succeed in this structure as a black person, you have to click — in some hard-to-define way for which nobody is accountable — with a white person who gets to say yes or no to you. That person’s approval is the only path.
Now go back and replace “Bacheloron” with “boss” and “chosen” with “promoted,” and you’ll see that they may have accidentally set up a really freaky metaphor for the way structural racism can sometimes work without anybody setting out to do it. They consider this system, by the way, to be utterly race-neutral. But in practice, in actual undeniable fact, it has been a story almost entirely of a white person picking the next white person, and of that white person then picking another white person, and everybody shrugging and saying, “I just went with my gut! It was love!”
Related: “Yes, Your Dating Preferences Are Probably Racist” (← and a collection of some of the other things I have posted on this topic)
