The Amazon Prime series Modern Love (based on the popular eponymous New York Times column) was released on October 17. White women gushed on social media, saying the show made them cry, and that these depictions of love were so moving, so beautifully human, so modern.

After watching the show, I cried too—longer and harder than I care to admit. But I cried because, as a Black woman, the show made me feel anything but romantic. With its total exclusion of Black, brown, and Indigenous women as love interests, I felt invisible and dehumanized. Modern Love was incredibly traumatizing to watch, reminding me of all the gendered violence and dismissal I’ve faced in my life.

Not one woman of color was a love interest. Instead, they fulfilled support roles for White women and men of color. If one were to take Modern Love’s word for it, women of color in New York City don’t experience romance or desire. They’re merely therapists, domestic workers, and ever-patient maternal friends.

The exclusion of women of color in this series is so blatant that it can only be intentional. Even in the intro, old black-and-white pictures of happy lovers are contrasted with vibrant, colorful, modern-day snapshots of romance. Plenty of Black women, with their elegant midcentury hairdos and wide smiles, are featured in the old pictures. But in the present-day pictures, Black women are nowhere to be found. One can imagine them waiting patiently outside the frame, facilitating love for others but understanding that they themselves have no place in this brave new world.

Credit: Amazon Studios

But in Modern Love, men of color are afforded a ticket to modernity that women of color are not. In the show, men of color — two Black men, one Indian man, and one Japanese man — are all shown either in love, falling in love, or trying to fall in love with White people. This is far from the only film where men of color ignore or discard women of color as romantic partners.

The exclusion of women of color in this series is so blatant that it can only be intentional.

In the movie The Big Sick, a Desi man (Kumail Nanjiani) rejects the South Asian women his mother wants him to marry in favor of a White woman. He even burns the pictures of these Desi women, presenting the ashes to his White girlfriend as a sick sign of devotion. Reviewing this film, Aisha Mirza writes, “It’s sad that straight men of color and White women insist on using the fallacy of depoliticized love as a way to enact White supremacist and patriarchal violence and to further the erasure and abuses of women of color.”

This dynamic is reflected off-screen as well. A 2012 study published in Sociology of Education showed that boys of color in predominantly White schools have an easier time assimilating because they are able to access “coolness” in ways that girls of color are not. Often, they attain this social status and desired interracial contact by denigrating the girls of color around them.