Trying to sue the Bachelor and the Bachelorette into diversity? [View all]

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I don't know about you, but this does not seem like a good strategy. They will have a hell of a hard time proving systematic discrimination, and even if they do it will take years and years (at which time the show may have run its course anyway).

If this is really important to them, a boycott would get action from ABC much faster than a lengthy lawsuit.


http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/05/21/the-bachelor-and-bachelorette-inside-the-racial-discrimination-lawsuit.html

The Bachelor’ and ‘The Bachelorette’: Inside the Racial Discrimination Lawsuit
May 21, 2012 4:45 AM EDT

Any TV viewer with eyes has noticed The Bachelor’s and The Bachelorette’s persistent whiteness. Can a class-action lawsuit force the shows to become diverse? Jennifer L. Pozner reports .

Skinny, weepy white women + horny, wealthy white men = love.

That calculus has governed casting on The Bachelor since its 2002 debut on ABC. Ten years, one spinoff (The Bachelorette), and 24 seasons later, every star of TV’s oldest reality romance franchise has been white. So were 22 of the 25 hopefuls on The Bachelorette’s Season 8 premiere last week. With that history, it came as no surprise that we heard almost no dialogue from the lone black contestant, Lerone, or that Southern blonde Emily Maynard sent him packing at the end of the episode. (On Twitter, one viewer suggested a #MenOfColorCountdown to see how long the Brazilian grain merchant and Colombian mushroom farmer will last.)

Now, a racial discrimination lawsuit aims to prove that this casting math isn’t only faulty—it’s illegal.

On April 18, two African-American men, Nathaniel Claybrooks and Christopher Johnson, filed a class-action suit alleging that ABC; the shows’ production companies, Warner Horizon, Next Entertainment, NZK Productions; and the shows’ creator, Mike Fleiss, “knowingly, intentionally, and as a matter of corporate policy refused to cast people of color in the role of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette.” The complaint charges that this “intentional scheme” of “deliberate exclusion … underscores the significant barriers that people of color continue to face in the media and the broader marketplace.”

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