Episode 2- "Divas, Queens, and Bubalas"

In this episode, we get to the meat of the "tragic mulattoness" that we were promised. When we're introduced to Ashley, we see the season's first appearance of the "What Are You" question.

Robyn to Ashley- "And are you mixed or anything? With what?
Ashley-"Black and white"
Gizelle to Katie-"Katie, what are you today? Are you black and white?"
Katie-"I don't know what I am. 
Gizelle to Katie -"We're gonna need for you to know".

Oh Katie, I feel for you. Ashley rolled with the question here, but Katie stood firm in her biracialness which was something that Gizelle was not having. We get more insight about why this is a little bit later on in the episode at Katie's house.

Robyn to Katie- "How was your experience growing up black and Jewish?"
Katie- "I grew up like biracial...there were no other black people anywhere I was"
Robyn-"What box are your girls gonna check?"
Gizelle- "Are they gonna be black?"
Katie-"I don't know, like 'other'"
Gizelle-"They gotta figure it out. This is the United States of America. You have to check a box."
Katie- "We should create out own box and like rally"

Katie- "They don't necessarily understand that I identify as biracial, it's like 'choose one or the other'.


via GIPHY

Poor Katie. She's in this group of light-skinned black women who aren't feeling her multiple identity self. And Gizelle in particular is not here for her being anything other than black, because for her, that's just how things work in America. But Katie bounces back quickly.

Katie to Robyn and Gizelle- "I mean even with the two of you, blonde with green eyes...a lot of people be like 'those bitches are not black'".
Gizelle- "People always ask me which one of your parents is white and I'm like 'no both of my parents are black. I'm a black woman". 
Robyn- "My eyes might be light, my hair might be dyed but I'm black and that's how I've identified my whole life"
Gizelle- "People know I'm black once I open my mouth.
Robyn-"As soon as I talk, you know that I'm black...and it's funny I don't see what y'all see, I look in the mirror and I see a black woman"
Other Friend: "That's all that matters unless you get arrested"


via GIPHY

Their random friend should've dropped a mic, because ultimately this is the subtext of the conversation that these ladies have been having all along. For Gizelle and Robyn, even though they may look biracial, their internalized black identity is unquestionable. And when Katie self-identifies as biracial, it seems like they experience her identity as a rejection of the ones that they've chosen. But what the random friend points out at the end of this conversation is that though Katie can feel biracial all day long, she still has to deal with the reality of the way that she is racialized by others in society. And when it comes down to it, even biracial Katie may be seen as black. Just ask the family of Tony Robinson.

And Katie's not the only one whose identity gets policed in this episode. Let's talk about Ashley. I am too excited to see Ashley and her natural hair in this sea of weaves. Gizelle may hate it ("As I look at Ashley, I just see hair"), but it's nice to see someone rocking a different style. I'm also here for her goofy new money self. Go 'head, Ashley. But Robyn is also not feeling Ashley's non-conforming style:
Robyn (about Ashley)- "Black women don't hump each other like that. Must be a white thing. She spent way too much time around white people".
At this point, Robyn knows about Ashley's mixedness, and when she engages in a behavior that Robyn disapproves of, she jumps to her experience as evidence that she doesn't belong with them.

Finally, a few linguistic observations. When Charrisse is questioning Gizelle's behavior, she says, "Where do they do DAT at? Not here, not Potomac". To my ear, Charrisee sounds black but doesn't use very many stereotypical grammatical or phonological features of African American English. However, in this case, where she's trying to indirectly point to Gizelle's behavior as "ghetto", she uses a highly stigmatized feature, "th-stopping" (where an initial "th" becomes a "d") to do that indexical linking.

One more language thing: Katie uses a lot of vocal fry as compared to the other women. I won't join in the shaming of young women for using vocal fry, but I will say that it is much less common among black women. So Katie's use of vocal fry might be part of her performance of an identity that is firmly biracial.

Random Unrelated Thought: #shadysunday seems a little off. Yes, the RHOP throw a lot of shade, but that doesn't mean that you can call it "shady". That means something else.

Episode 1- "Mind Your Manners"

I’m not a Housewives loyalist, but I’ve seen enough to get an idea of how the franchise works. Aspirationally fancy ladies spend a lot of time grooming themselves, planning social events and yelling at each other...got it. But the Real Housewives of Potomac (RHOP) is different from the other franchises in that its location is very specific, and its cast members, unlike the ones in Atlanta, are largely racially ambiguous looking black women. In the first episode, several issues related to race and the Housewives’ individual identities came up, and those are primarily what I wanna look at. Some observations:

In all of the transitions, Bravo elected to play a DC gogo beat. Gogo is a musical style that's very specific to DC's black community, so although the Housewives take great pains to tell us about how exclusive Potomac is, Bravo is telling views in the know that we should contextualize them women as DC Black. 

In our very first introduction to Katie and her white Jewish boyfriend (because Katie "loves Jewish men", because they're "good with money"), the couple ate at a restaurant called Mix. I might call this foreshadowing but it's SO heavy-handed. And though this is the first we see of Katie, I'm already done with her and her white boy fetishizing.

via GIPHY
Katie clearly needs help, but the real storyline of this episode is the three way shade competition between Karen, Charrisse, and Gizelle. Charrisse is the only non-ambiguous looking black woman in the franchise, and I'm glad that she'll be there to hopefully help us untangle some of the issues that the other women seem to have bubbling under the surface.

Speaking of Charrisse, let's take a moment to talk about the hair of every single person in this franchise. At Karen's birthday celebration, Gizelle compliments Charrisse’s (questionable) hair. Every single woman in this franchise (at this point) is what we'd call "fried, dyed and laid to the side" and/or addicted to weave. And every single one of them needs to get their edges together. Personally, I wanted to turn the mirror on Karen when she called out Gizelle at the crab boil and accused her of having a bad weave. For women who spend a lot of time policing each other, they desperately need someone to stage a weave intervention. This is not a tragic mulatto problem...all of them are old enough to know better.

via GIPHY
I'm less interested in all of the etiquette policing that they seem to do, but I will mention that the primary criticism that these women level upon each other are implications that they're only one step removed from poor black people (the horror!). This is especially interesting because of the interplay between class and race. Some of the sociological literature has shown that middle-class blacks and biracial people experience invalidation of their blackness directly related to their class status, but that's not how they're using it here. When Charissee complains about Karen's behavior "walking around with the help" and exclaiming "that's why I don’t go to the ghetto, it seems to function not as invalidation but rather simply exclusion from their in-group. But Gizelle's reaction to Karen etiquette policing her is based purely on class: “Karen…I have a legacy and a pedigree and you grew up on a farm". As the season continues, I'll be interested in seeing how this interplay between authentic blackness and authentic wealth continues!

Random unrelated thought: I know some of these women are in exclusive groups and black sororities, but for legal reasons, are probably not allowed to talk about it. This however, makes me super sad because it's germane to their social and racial identities. In out introduction to Robyn, it's clear that she's a Delta, but they blur out her DST license plate.  I wanna see more of this from the other housewives!

Welcome!

I’m a sociolinguist who specializes in African American Language and especially among people with one black parent and one white parent. I was inspired to start this blog after reading Shamira Ibrahim’s piece called The Real Housewives of Potomac and the Tragic Mulatto Syndrome, which also inspired the title of this blog. 

I hope to be blogging each week (briefly) about the racial and linguistic issues that arise in RHOP throughout the season.