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.

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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.

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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!