As television continues slowly to diversify, the dating show Love Island has finally followed suit, with the casting of the show’s first black female contestant, Samira Mighty.

Viewers have long complained that they are fed up with the conveyor belt of white women on the show. Yet her casting has only thrown into focus the struggles black women face when dating.

Unlike other shows, where diversity woes can simply be redressed by recasting, Love Island is complicated. The show has been praised for its unfiltered portrayal of the dark side of dating – from ghosting and gaslighting to toxic masculinity and relationships. But there is another reality the show has brought to the fore. Samira’s arrival highlighted the cast’s very slim (and white) definition of their “type”.

Samira was the last of the Islanders to find a match, with newcomer Sam, and while most of us are simply happy to see her finally paired off, it doesn’t negate the fact her much-delayed date simply mirrors real life: on dating apps, black women are less likely to receive responses to messages than any other ethnic group.

When Samira said her type was “blond hair and blue eyes”, Twitter users were shocked, with one even mocking up an image of her as a Nazi. When Wes, like most of the black or mixed-raced male contestants before him, professed to liking blondes and brunettes, viewers hardly flinched. And that is because it is simply ex-pec-ted: as stylist Ayishat Akanbi tweeted last year, “only black girls see a man of their own race that they are romantically interested in and have to consider whether he even likes black girls”.

The women in this year’s iteration can’t get enough of mixed-raced men, with both Georgia and Ellie admitting to them being “their type”. Mixed-raced women, however, have rarely fared well on the show: Montana from last year’s series aside, the other women were unable to find matches. This is not exclusively a TV issue – it is simply an issue TV brings to light. On the US dating show The Bachelor, black women were ditched early so often that producers took to casting a black Bachelorette in 2017. That way, whatever the outcome, the black woman would leave with a match. Samira may be coupled up for now, but Love Island would need a script flip of epic proportions to ensure black women were not consistently sidelined from the show and, in doing so, remove the prejudice of the real world from reality TV.