Watching While Black: Centering the Television of Black Audiences

9. Keepin' It Reality Television

9 Keepin’ It Reality Television racquel gates Introduction: Keepin’ It Real . . . Housewives of Atlanta On November 4, 2008, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show via satellite. One of the more memorable moments of the interview came when Cooper expressed shock that DeGeneres was unfamiliar with the hit Bravo television show The Real Housewives of Atlanta. “You mean you don’t know about NeNe?” he demanded incredulously, referring to cast member NeNe Leakes—the most outspoken and self-proclaimed “realest” of the Housewives. Cooper’s segment, along with his admission that Leakes was his favorite of the cast, brought even more attention to the already widely debated show, the first of Bravo’s Housewives series to feature a predominantly African American cast.1 The Real Housewives of Atlanta profiles the lives, experiences, and interactions of a group of wealthy women living in Atlanta, Georgia. The show built on the success of Bravo’s previous two offerings, The Real Housewives of Orange County (2006–) and The Real Housewives of New York (2008–).2 Having developed an enthusiastic following over the course of its first season, Atlanta opened its second season with a record-breaking 2.7 million viewers, beating out viewership for any other Housewives premiere by over 1 million viewers. As the first primarily nonwhite offering in the Housewives franchise, the show presented race as a signi ficant characteristic from the outset. In the premiere episode, the words African American or Black are mentioned no less than three times in the first thirty seconds , all before the opening credits. The background music common to all of the Housewives shows was given a pronounced drumbeat for the Atlanta edition, adding a tinge of hip hop flavor to various scenes. The success of the show, however, was tempered by mixed responses from various groups. The aforementioned NeNe Leakes garnered the largest amount of press and the greatest variety of responses due to her gregarious behavior and habit of “telling it like it is.” Not everyone was impressed by her larger-than-life personality. One viewer complained, “It was like a herd of cattle wearing wigs and lipstick passed through my living room.”3 Another viewer disgustedly commented , “This show needs subtitles. I don’t think anyone speaks English. Must get out my Detroit Ghetto Translation Guide. Holy shit, what a mess of ugly, gross bimbos.”4 141 The criticism of Leakes and her cast mates overwhelmingly converged on the women’s femininity, speech patterns, and mannerisms: sites where preconceived notions of “upper class,” “successful,” and “housewife” (historically underscored by an implicit vision of whiteness) did not match the image that the Black Atlanta housewives projected. The elements that marked them as “different” and thus a symbol of the racial diversity that Bravo sought to achieve also signaled their deviation from the norm established by the white housewives from the Orange County and New York series.5 From the very first episode, Atlanta involved a clash of realities that was based on the specificities of racialized, gendered difference. The same traits that many cited as flaws, however, took on radically different interpretations depending on who was doing the watching. As I noted in the opening paragraph, CNN journalist Anderson Cooper equated these qualities with a kind of “authenticity” that he found refreshing. Bravo executive Andy Cohen defined Leakes’s behavior as “camp.” An openly gay man, Cohen explained the relationship between Bravo’s gay male viewers and the Housewives: “Gays love these shows for the same reason gays love drag queens. They’re an exaggerated portrayal of women, what gay guys want women to be in their twisted fantasy lives.”6 Far from viewing the Housewives as “negative” representations, Cohen celebrated the unique perspective that the women brought to everyday issues and struggles. The Real Housewives of Atlanta illuminates certain questions inherent to racial representation and reality television. Yet this chapter is not interested in qualitative evaluations of The Real Housewives of Atlanta or any other reality television program. Though there are certainly many convincing arguments for and against the utility of reality-based narratives in service to progressive representations of race in the media, that project, I fear, runs the risk of continuing to group media into categories of “positive” or “negative.” Instead, this chapter offers an overarching view of how reality television resituates discourses of racial representation within the specificities of its generic conventions. In particular, I argue that reality television thrives on the...