Another season of “The Bachelorette” is underway on ABC, and unlike Lee, The New York Times is still here for the right reasons. Our resident obsessives are following Rachel Lindsay’s love journey while dancing to the sound of Russell Dickerson’s voice. Can we steal you for a sec?
JON CARAMANICA There was little chance that this season of “The Bachelorette” wouldn’t detour from Rachel’s quest for love into an uncareful study of American racial paranoia, but the intensity of the swerve in the two weeks since the last episode has still been distressingly high.
At the end of the last episode, the show teased that a confrontation between Lee and Kenny was coming, just a few days after — in the real world — some of Lee’s old racist tweets resurfaced. (The way this show and other reality programs cleverly utilize the interplay of real-life content and televised-life content is a subject for a later conversation.)
Lee is an instigator, and one who this week deployed two fallacious tricks — the specter of black aggression and the halo of white innocence — in his pursuit of Rachel, who does not appear to have sniffed out his game. (She also didn’t seem to mind that Peter, when he was rapping, called her a “girl from the hood,” possibly the least sensitive thing a contestant has done directly to Rachel, and that includes lying to her face.)
The racial awkwardness on the show is so obvious that Dean — of “I’m ready to go black and I’m never going to go back” fame — was presented as an astute scholar. “The only people that I’ve seen Lee pick fights with have been not the people that he’s used to seeing on a daily basis, from a cultural perspective,” he said, which is to say: black men. (Iggy, too, seems only to pick squabbles with the black men in the group.)
Regardless, Lee got a rose. There is good television, and there is ethical television, though I’m not sure showing someone with racial animus on full blast being rewarded is both, or either.
AMANDA HESS I, too, have been wondering when this season of “The Bachelorette” would erupt into a reality-television race war, and it seems that producers have found their spark in the cryptoracist good ol’ boy Lee.
Has it ever felt grosser to be a member of Bachelor Nation? The whiplash between the show’s kumbaya images of postracial harmony (Kenny raps! And then … Peter raps!) and its obvious instigation of racist conflict is making me ill. That feeling culminated for me when Lee interrupted Kenny’s one-on-one time with Rachel because he had something “really important” to tell her — uh, that his granddaddy had cancer once and gave him a knife that he then brought on set with him. I’m hoping that thing isn’t Chekhov’s knife (the host Chris Harrison’s knife?), but given the teaser at the end of the episode that shows Kenny with his eye gushing blood, I can’t be sure. (Stay tuned for next week’s “shocking two-night ‘Bachelorette’ event!”)
That Lee — an “alternative-facts piece of garbage,” as Kenny called him — received a rose Monday night speaks to some dastardly producer interference. Mr. Harrison waltzing in to tell Rachel, on camera, that the producers are only there to help her realize her…
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