I love the Housewives. I don’t get off on recreationally tearing any of them down, because I appreciate the opportunity they give us to both distract from and reflect on our own lives. And last night’s episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills offered the latter. Dorit gave us white women a good glimpse at ourselves. And it was ugly.
I’ll set the stage for the ten people on earth that don’t watch RHOBH: Castmates Garcelle Beauvais and Dorit Kemsley are having lunch. Garcelle is attempting, once again, to explain to Dorit that there are certain words that take on a different meaning when used towards black women, in this case, the word attack. She goes on to generously share that the same applies to the words angry and aggressive.
Dorit, desperately clinging to her objective to clear herself of any possible racial misstep, compulsively blinks back in horror at her inability to achieve her goal.
Here is what Dorit was missing:
1) When someone shares their experience of how you made them feel, responding by telling them, “That’s hurtful,” is dismissive. By claiming to be hurt by someone’s feedback, you are attempting to make them wrong. (This goes for all relationships and scenarios, regardless of race.) Dorit has done this many times, and twice this season with Garcelle specifically. (First, when Garcelle shared she didn’t trust the group as it relates to her children.)
The “hurt” that Dorit might feel when presented with the truth of how she impacts other people, might actually be shame. But that emotion is less tolerable and requires accountability and reflection. If she was willing to self-reflect, she might discover that the better response might be something closer to “I want this not to be true, and the fact that it is, makes me feel embarrassed/remorseful/regretful.” Because anytime anyone gets up the courage to honor your relationship enough to share their feelings, they are not being hurtful. They are being a forthright, guileless adult who values themselves and believes you to be capable of similar fortitude and values. Don’t prove them wrong by making yourself a victim in a problem you created.
2) Dorit cannot hope to be absolved of any bias when her distress is rooted in reputation management, rather than how her choice of words affected Garcelle. I will not speak for Garcelle, but I imagine that this is at the heart of why she claims Dorit gets under her skin: because Dorit exhibits no desire to understand and remedy her internal biases, but rather, simply wishes to be cleared of wrongdoing by attempting to prove Garcelle’s experience is mistaken and misguided.
3) It’s scary to have your ignorance and biases pointed out to you in a society that seeks to no longer tolerate them. But what Dorit and so many white people fail to understand is that it is ok to learn that we are wrong. We won’t die. Nor can I think of an instance where anyone has been cancelled for genuinely accepting their unintentional ignorance with humility, accountability, and curiosity.
We must also be willing to acknowledge that we as a people have cellular, ancestorial resistance to being put in our place by people that we have generationally had dominance over. White people tend to think that acknowledging truths like this demonstrates racism, when in fact it is the denial of such truth that keeps us tethered to it. Spoiler alert: the black community knows these things in their bones and when “good” white people want to pretend it isn’t true because {gasp} what will that say about us, we are gaslighting the very people we claim to be aligned to.
4) Dorit’s confessional, where she looks into the camera and grimaces about the “dangerous” implications that she doesn’t “feel comfortable with…at all” is nonsense. White women are not the ones in danger, ever, in a racially heated scenario. Dorit’s discomfort stems from fear of her reputation and the fact that she might be taken to task on something she is either incapable of or unwilling to access and eradicate within herself.
5) Intention does not matter. Nor does your perception of yourself. You cannot hang your Chanel newsboy cap on “I didn’t mean it that way,” when you wouldn’t wipe the slate clean when your spouse attempted to issue a similar sentiment. When we cause damage to another that we might not immediately understand, we need to hold ourselves to the same standard we would hold our husbands. And for those of us in hetero relationships, a good man is going to accept when he’s made a misstep he was unaware of, go out of his way to ensure he doesn’t similarly injure, and seek to develop a greater awareness for the ways in which he might need to hold certain sensitivities when speaking to a woman. Same goes for white women in relationship with black women.
6) When Garcelle points out to Dorit that she should understand that they live in two different sets of shoes, Dorit self-righteously replies that she most certainly understands that. The subtext I heard based on her tone, frustration, and combativeness was “but that’s not my fault, why are you blaming me?!”
And this is the heart of the problem. This is the mafia wife response. I know that you as a black woman are marginalized, overlooked, silenced, ignored, judged, patronized, and have the least power, respect, and authority of any other group of people in this country. And I feel bad and wish it were different for you. BUT I DIDN’T DO IT TO YOU.
Just like a mafia wife, that’s where it ends. It’s bad, but I’m not bad. So why should I have to forgo my mink? Or in this case, why should I have to be corrected? Why should I have to be humbled? Why should I have to gain a greater curiosity for how I might be a problematic white person?
To which I would say, you don’t have to, Dorit. You don’t have to do any of those things if you don’t want to. But don’t stomp your Louis’s and bang your fists when someone calls you a Karen.
I will probably receive correction for an insensitivity or important point I overlooked in this post. And I will receive that and all the shame that comes with it. I’ve been corrected both gently and intensely in the past and they sting equally. My work is to sit in the shame and the discomfort that brings, and allow it to melt into gratitude for further developing my awareness.
To feel disgust for abject and overt racism is not enough. To be truly anti-racist, we must humbly and continually excavate and eradicate our internal, inherited, imprinted biases and racism. It’s a job that might never be complete in our lifetime. But you’ll know you’re almost there when a black woman shares how you make her feel, and your reaction is not “why are you doing this to me?”
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