Kudos to Southern Belle Emily Maynard, star of this season’s The Bachelorette, for not caving to media pressure by keeping the lone Black contestant around just to appease the false gods of political correctness.

That calculus has governed casting on The Bachelor since its 2002 debut on ABC. Ten years, one spinoff (The Bachelorette), and 24 seasons later, every star of TV’s oldest reality romance franchise has been white. So were 22 of the 25 hopefuls on The Bachelorette’s Season 8 premiere last week. With that history, it came as no surprise that we heard almost no dialogue from the lone black contestant, Lerone, or that Southern blonde Emily Maynard sent him packing at the end of the episode. On April 18, two African-American men, Nathaniel Claybrooks and Christopher Johnson, filed a class-action suit alleging that ABC; the shows’ production companies, Warner Horizon, Next Entertainment, NZK Productions; and the shows’ creator, Mike Fleiss, “knowingly, intentionally, and as a matter of corporate policy refused to cast people of color in the role of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette.” The complaint charges that this “intentional scheme” of “deliberate exclusion … underscores the significant barriers that people of color continue to face in the media and the broader marketplace.”



Bachelorette Emily Maynard

Naturally, unless something is 90% non-White, like the NBA, minorities feel as though they are not sufficiently represented.

To hear the MSM tell it, “racism” is far more alive and well in the day of affirimative action, quotas, and set asides than it ever was during the so-called Jim Crow era.

There is already a lot of “diversity” in formulaic trash TV and movies, but that’s for propaganda, not profits. When a TV producer or movie producer really wants to make sure a show or movie will “work,” they keep it White. Romance is a European thing.

That, of course, won’t absolve The Bachelorette from constant accusations of “racism.” But I do wonder how many times some of Tyler Perry’s all-Black movies have suffered the same attack? How about the shows on BET?