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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

opinion

Lifetime needs an intervention

Lifetime is killing me. Like dropping a Mack truck on me, killing me.

The network’s new show “Girlfriend Intervention” infuriates every nerve ending in my entire body and insults my very being.

If you haven’t heard, “Girlfriend Intervention” is television’s latest attempt at not being racist by being racist.

The show is modeled somewhat on “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.”

There are four “experts”: Tracy Balan, the beauty pro, Nikki Chu, the interior decorator, Tiffiny Dixon, the “fashion maven,” and Tanisha Thomas, the soul coach.

Together they transform another woman into a happy, confident butterfly, and all is right in the world again.

Here’s the kicker: the four hosts are black, and the women they’re “helping” are white. From the look of it, they are ?exclusively white.

“Trapped inside every white girl is a strong black woman busting to get out,” Thomas said in the beginning of the first episode.

No. No, there’s not.

There might be different qualities in every woman — but there is not a black woman inside them.

This show works off the premise that all black women are the same.

And we’re not. As awesome as it would be if every woman — white, Hispanic, Asian or black — had those traits, that is not the reality.

There are just as many black women who are insecure with body image issues, who don’t always speak their minds and who don’t have a snappy ?comment at the ready.

At the end of a clip released before the showed officially premiered, Thomas said, “You’re officially now black, whether you like it or not.”

Wrong again. Being black is not an act.

It’s not something you can just throw your shoulders back and become.

We all probably know someone who “acts black.”

I tease my mom about it all the time. In our society we have an idea of what it means to be black.

We’ve defined it as the way you talk, dress and walk.

I am told on an almost weekly basis that I “act white” because of the way I talk, dress and walk.

Enunciating my words and wearing cardigans does not make me white. Letting your pants hang under your butt does not make you black.

At the end of the day, what we have left is the color of our skin.

And no little personality quirks are going to change it.

This show is not helping our society. It is embracing and flaunting common racial stereotypes and making a profit off of them. Maybe they are helping these women.

I can’t deny that the ladies in the show looked happy with their results. There is nothing wrong with giving a woman confidence.

What’s wrong is giving that woman a different racial ?identity.

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