This week, amidst global unrest, The Real Co-host Amanda Seales announced her departure from the daytime show. The announcement comes six months after Seales’ addition to the table and five years after Tamar Braxton’s ejection from the talk show series. 

Seales and Braxton brought vastly different components to the table, but both are outspoken Black women whose presence and demeanor does not placate white comfort. Their elimination makes two truths quite evident. The first is that the show is a pillar in propagating the woman of color aesthetic. Seales and Braxton do not aid the show in this feat. In acknowledging this truth, it is imperative to note that neither Braxton or Seales are black nationalists, yet, even they are too black for a colorblind canvass painted by women of color. To specify what I mean here, women or color have color but maintain an espousal to whiteness. Tamara Mowry and Loni Love, the two other cohost of African descent, function as women of color as their comments reflect a social detachment from an affiliation conveyed only by their skin. This assertion bleeds into my next point . 

Braxton and Seales’ departure illuminates the white energy and leadership that pulls the strings for the featured women of color. Specifically, thought the faces featured at The Real table are those of color, the unseen faces prove synonymous to the intangible enemy that continues to hinder black trajectory globally. To allude to the title of Frantz Fanon’s pivotal work, the women of color consummates the black, or non-white, skin as masking a whiteness that lie beneath.

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Braxton and Seales’ departure illuminates the struggle many Black women encounter globally, the pressue to tuck their identity within integrative demands. These demands are a lot more stealth in the contemporary world as they illuminate imaging as showing something that  an anti-black world never intended to actualize. 

Truthfully, this news could not have come at a better time. The Real illuminates the change the contemporary fervor promises to engender. This change depicts whites as seeming to “get out of the way” only to get behind the scenes.  Simultaneously, this scenario illuminates that neither black lives, nor the black perspective, matters unless a non black is pulling the strings. 

Furthermore, The Real can’t keep a black woman whose black skin will not don the white mask the “woman of color” image and phrase veils.