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The Bachelor Is Broken
After breakups, normal people hand their phones over to their friends. Unfollow on social media. Ignore former lovers at parties. In Bachelorland, the ex’s are pushed through a spin cycle of intimate public testimony, the two performing a posthumous investigation of their love. In prior seasons, this contrivance of truncated, albeit ‘real’, love has felt unimaginative, with boy and girl trading lovely epithets about their shared romance. The meeting between Rachael Kirkconnell and Matt James — our most recent eligible bachelor — did not feel like this. The relationship ended just a few months after it really began, encouraged toward its fate by new information: that Rachael, among other offenses, had attended an “Antebellum” themed party while in college. Chris Harrison, the patriarch of the Bachelor franchise, was nowhere to be found during Monday’s interview, having been sidelined for defending Rachael days after the photos leaked.
The franchise has attempted to mollify the insistence on its own whiteness for some time now. Bachelornation, as the fans are affectionately called, added to this last month when the Kirkconnell photos leaked and again when Harrison’s defense consisted of resoundingly white whataboutisms that situated Kirkconnell as a victim of her own actions. Monday night’s display signaled that the franchise might be ready not just to hear feedback about its own racist inclinations, but…
