Reality TV Did to Black Women What Minstrel Shows Did to Black Men

In 1848, a white performer named Thomas Dartmouth Rice took the stage in blackface, contorted his body into an exaggerated parody of Black movement, spoke in a manufactured dialect designed to signal stupidity and subservience, and performed a character called Jim Crow. The audience roared. The show was a sensation. For the next sixty years, the minstrel show was the most popular form of entertainment in America, generating enormous profits for white producers and performers who had discovered a commercial truth that has never stopped being true: there is money — vast, reliable, seemingly inexhaustible money — in the performance of Black stereotypes for a paying audience. In 2011, a television producer named Mona Scott-Young launched Love & Hip Hop on VH1, and the minstrel show got its upgrade. The blackface was gone. The performers were real Black women. Everything else — the exaggeration, the manufactured conflict, the reduction of Black humanity to a set of entertaining pathologies, and the profit structure in which white-owned networks extracted value from Black performance — was identical.

This is not a metaphor. It is a structural analysis. The minstrel show took the diversity of Black male experience and compressed it into a handful of stereotypes — the buffoon, the brute, the docile servant — that could be performed, consumed, and monetized. Reality television took the diversity of Black female experience and compressed it into a handful of stereotypes — the angry Black woman, the gold digger, the hypersexual temptress, the violent aggressor — that could be performed, consumed, and monetized. Both industries were created by white producers. Both were enormously profitable. Both claimed to be entertainment. Both did immeasurable damage to the populations they depicted. And both were consumed enthusiastically by the very communities being caricatured, which is the part of the story that is most painful and most necessary to confront.

The Numbers Behind the Damage

Love & Hip Hop averaged 3.5 million viewers per episode at its peak. The Real Housewives of Atlanta consistently drew between 2.5 and 3.5 million viewers per episode, making it the highest-rated franchise in the Real Housewives empire. Basketball Wives drew 2 million. Bad Girls Club drew 1.5 million. Across the landscape of reality television featuring Black women — a landscape that expanded rapidly through the 2010s as networks discovered that Black female conflict was a reliable ratings engine — tens of millions of viewers per week consumed programming in which Black women screamed at each other, threw drinks at each other, pulled each other’s hair, competed for the attention of men who treated them with open contempt, and engaged in behavior that, if depicted by white actors in blackface, would be immediately recognized as racist caricature.

The audience composition data is critical. Nielsen viewership data shows that these programs drew disproportionately Black audiences — in many cases, majority-Black audiences. Love & Hip Hop’s audience was approximately 60% Black in many seasons. This means that the primary consumers of the minstrelization of Black women were Black people themselves, a fact that parallels the history of actual minstrelsy: Black audiences attended minstrel shows in significant numbers, sometimes in segregated balcony sections, watching white performers in blackface parody Black life, because in a culture that offered almost no other representation, even distorted representation felt like visibility.

The Stereotype Machinery

Tia Tyree’s research, published in the Howard Journal of Communications, systematically catalogued the stereotypes of Black women in reality television and found that they mapped precisely onto the stereotypes that scholars had spent decades identifying and dismantling: the Sapphire (the angry, loud, emasculating Black woman), the Jezebel (the hypersexual temptress), the Gold Digger (the materialistic schemer), and the Bad Black Girl (the violent, out-of-control aggressor). These are not archetypes. They are weapons. They were created during slavery to justify the exploitation of Black women — the Jezebel stereotype, for instance, was manufactured to justify the systematic sexual assault of enslaved women by reframing their violation as their own desire — and they have been maintained, across centuries, because they continue to serve the interests of those who profit from them.

Reality television did not create these stereotypes. It industrialized them. It took images that had circulated in American culture for centuries and gave them production values, theme music, and a weekly time slot. And it did so through a process that deserves to be called what it is: manufactured performance. The “reality” in reality television is the most successful marketing fraud in the history of American media. These shows are produced. They have writers, though those writers are called “story producers” or “segment producers” to circumvent union requirements. They have scripts, though those scripts are called “story outlines” or “scene prompts.” They have directors who instruct participants to repeat confrontations, escalate arguments, and produce the emotional extremes that make good television.

“I’m not interested in being a stereotype. I want to be interesting. I want to push people and make them think.”
— Issa Rae

The Business Model of Black Female Pain

The economics are straightforward and damning. A single episode of Love & Hip Hop cost approximately $500,000 to $800,000 to produce — a fraction of the cost of scripted programming, which is the fundamental economic advantage of reality television. A thirty-second advertising spot during the show’s peak seasons sold for $50,000 to $80,000. With sixteen to eighteen minutes of advertising per hour-long episode, a single episode could generate $1.5 million to $2.5 million in advertising revenue against production costs of less than $1 million. Over a twenty-episode season, the show generated tens of millions in profit for VH1, which is owned by Paramount Global, which is not a Black-owned company, which does not have a Black CEO, which does not direct its profits to the communities from which it extracts its content.

The cast members themselves — the Black women whose performances of stereotypical behavior generate this revenue — are paid a fraction of the value they create. First-season cast members on Love & Hip Hop reportedly received between $10,000 and $50,000 per episode. Top-billed veterans could earn $300,000 to $500,000 per season. These figures sound substantial until you consider that the show generated approximately $40 to $60 million in annual advertising revenue for the network. The women who perform the stereotypes receive pennies on the dollar. The white-owned corporation that distributes the stereotypes keeps the rest. This is, structurally, indistinguishable from the economics of minstrelsy.

The Research on Harm

The research on the effects of stereotypical media portrayals is voluminous and consistent. Mastro and Behm-Morawitz demonstrated that exposure to stereotypical media depictions of minorities increases stereotypical thinking among viewers, including viewers who belong to the stereotyped group. This is not a minor finding. It means that a young Black woman who watches Love & Hip Hop is statistically more likely, after viewing, to believe that Black women are aggressive, hypersexual, and materialistic — not because she has observed these traits in her own life but because the media she consumes has normalized them as representative of her identity.

Robin Boylorn’s ethnographic research on Black women’s consumption of reality television found something more nuanced and more troubling: many Black women watch these shows with a combination of pleasure and shame, enjoying the spectacle while recognizing that it damages the broader perception of Black womanhood. This dual consciousness — watching your own caricature and being entertained by it even as you know it diminishes you — is a psychological burden that has no equivalent in the viewing experience of the white audience, which can consume the same content without being implicated by it.

The self-reinforcing cycle is the most insidious element. Young Black women see these portrayals on television and internalize them as normal — not as the manufactured, produced, scripted performances of stereotypes that they are, but as authentic representations of Black female identity. The shows become aspirational for some viewers, not in the sense that they aspire to the specific behaviors depicted but in the sense that the visibility, the celebrity, the social media following, and the financial success of cast members become goals that are associated with the performance of those stereotypes. The pathway to visibility for a young Black woman in the reality television era runs through the demonstration of the very behaviors that the shows have taught her are authentic expressions of her identity.

The Counter-Narrative

What makes this moment different from the minstrelsy era is that Black women are also creating the counter-narrative, and the counter-narrative is winning. Issa Rae began with a YouTube series called The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl — a title that was itself a refusal of the stereotypes, an insistence that awkwardness, introversion, and ordinary complexity were as authentically Black as anything on VH1 — and built it into Insecure, an HBO series that depicted Black women as they actually live: complicated, contradictory, sometimes messy, always human, never reduced to a single note.

Shonda Rhimes, through Scandal, How to Get Away with Murder, and Bridgerton, demonstrated that Black women could anchor prestige television, command massive audiences, and generate enormous revenue without performing stereotypes. Quinta Brunson’s Abbott Elementary did something even more revolutionary: it made a hit comedy about Black women who were teachers, who were good at their jobs, who were funny because they were human and not because they were performing pathology. The show averaged over 10 million viewers per episode when delayed viewing was included, proving that audiences — Black and white — were hungry for portrayals of Black women that treated them as people rather than as spectacles.

These counter-narratives matter, but they do not erase the damage. The research is clear: positive portrayals do not neutralize negative portrayals. They coexist, and the negative portrayals, because they are more dramatic, more emotionally arousing, and more consistent with pre-existing stereotypes, are more cognitively sticky. A viewer who watches Abbott Elementary and Love & Hip Hop in the same week does not average the two portrayals into a balanced view of Black womanhood. The stereotypical portrayal reinforces existing biases; the nuanced portrayal is processed as an exception.

What Must Change

The solution is not censorship, and it is not the elimination of reality television, and it is not the policing of what Black women can or cannot watch. The solution is structural. It is about ownership. Mona Scott-Young, who created Love & Hip Hop, is a Black woman who built a media empire by producing content that damages Black women. The moral complexity of that fact cannot be resolved by simply labeling her a villain. She operated within a system that rewards the production of Black stereotypes with enormous financial returns, and she made a rational economic decision within that system. The system is the problem.

When Black women own the networks — not the production companies, the networks — the incentive structure changes. When Black women control the advertising revenue, the editorial decisions, and the distribution platforms, the content changes because the people making decisions about what gets made are the same people who bear the consequences of what gets aired. Tyler Perry owns a studio. Oprah Winfrey owns a network. These are meaningful achievements. They are not sufficient. The vast majority of content consumed by Black audiences is still produced, distributed, and monetized by corporations that are not owned by Black people, that do not employ Black executives in decision-making positions, and that have no accountability to the communities they depict.

Media literacy is the other essential investment. The ability to watch a reality television show and understand it as a produced, manufactured, economically motivated performance of stereotypes — rather than as an authentic documentary of Black life — is a skill that must be taught, because the entire apparatus of reality television is designed to prevent viewers from acquiring it. The shows present themselves as real. The fourth wall is never broken. The production apparatus is invisible. The stereotypes are normalized through repetition until they feel like observation rather than construction. Teaching young Black women to see the machinery behind the performance is not optional. It is self-defense.

The minstrel show did not die because audiences became enlightened. It died because the cultural context changed sufficiently that the performance of blackface became socially unacceptable — a process that took decades and required sustained, deliberate pressure from Black communities and their allies. Reality television’s exploitation of Black women will end the same way: not through a sudden moral awakening but through the gradual, difficult, generational work of changing what is acceptable, what is profitable, and who controls the means of representation. Issa Rae and Quinta Brunson are doing that work. So is every Black woman who turns off the television and refuses to be a rating point in someone else’s profit margin. The minstrel show lasted sixty years. We are fifteen years into its successor. The question is whether this generation will be the one that ends it, or whether it will take another fifty years and another generation of Black women growing up with a mirror that shows them a caricature and calls it a reflection.