32-year-old DJ and Bachelorette contestant Kupah James caused quite a scene on Monday night’s episode of The Bachelorette. He pulled Kaitlyn aside at the rose ceremony to chastise her for “ignoring him” and accused her of keeping him on the show just because of his race. He said “I don’t want to be here any longer than I have to if I’m just the minority guy filling a quota”–but the problem was Kupah was actually ignoring Kaitlyn.
Kaitlyn appears genuinely shocked and hurt by his claim and said that she thought they had real chemistry and told him why she was so attracted to him initially.
Kupah then with his tail between his legs, tries to backtrack. Kaitlyn says she needs time to think it over—so at that point Kupah still had a chance.
But Kupah blows it. He goes back to the cocktail party and starts bad-mouthing Kaitlyn to the other guys. Kaitlyn overhears him and stomps out and says, “you don’t have a quiet voice. I can tell you’re upset…I’m sorry I’m going to have to let you go.”
He replies “that’s f#cked up”…. and she replies. “you go and talk to the guys….”
The whole exchange was odd. Kupah was not taking no for an answer and was belligerent about wanting to stay. I’m not sure how or why he thought that would “work” and would make her fall in love with him.
And next Monday Kupah has a meltdown in front of cameras as they try and get an exit ITM out of him.
It’s significant because it’s the first time a contestant has accused the show on camera of being racist. There has been a ton of chatter about the fact that the show has yet to have a black lead, but was Kupah’s behavior really fair and are all the accusations against ABC really fair?
Personally I don’t think so. The show revolves around the lead. ABC carefully chooses a lead whom they think will attract the largest audience. They are purely about ratings—as every Television show is. This has led them to adopt the formula of casting the most loved contestant from the previous season to be the next lead. And this happens to have been a Caucasian, but is it really their fault?
Every season they cast 25 contestants and typically about a quarter of them are minorities. For any number of reasons those folks have not ended in the position that makes sense for ABC to cast them as the next lead. You can bet that had Filipino contestant Catherine Giudici been booted by Sean Lowe she would have certainly been cast as the lead of The Bachelorette, but sadly for America she won the heart of Sean and married him, thus we did not get to watch her lead her own season.
The same went for Roberto Martinez on Ali’s season—and Mary Delgado on Byron Velvick’s season. And you can not accuse ABC of keeping those contestants because they were minorities because they actually won! So those are examples of a minority who made it ALL the way to the end, but because they actually won and were not in 2nd, 3rd, or 4th or even booted at all, it didn’t work out for them to lead.
And ABC did cast Venezuelan Juan Pablo as the Bachelor and look how that turned out for them? I guess that’s why these folks no longer complain about the lack of a Latino lead.
The show is about “love”, and attraction is based on a million things. Race is one of a million components that may lead to a physical and emotional connection between 2 people but it is certainly not the most important factor.
I would argue that those demanding that ABC cast an African American lead in the name of social justice are really diminishing the whole idea of “love”, reducing it to something as shallow and unimportant as the color of someone’s skin rather than the content of their character.