Some People Are Asking What Took So Long To Get a Black Lead on ‘The Bachelorette’

One of the most popular reality TV programmes in the US has cast an African-American lead. People are asking: what took so long?

It was no huge surprise that Monday night’s announcement of the latest lead in America’s most popular reality TV dating show franchise, The Bachelorette, got Twitter excited. But this announcement was, in the words of its producer Mike Fleiss, “historic”.

That’s because after 16 years and 33 seasons, the ABC franchise cast 31-year-old lawyer Rachel Lindsay as its first black Bachelorette. There has only been one previous minority lead. In 2013, Juan Pablo Galavis, a Venezuelan-American, was cast as the Bachelor.

The reveal of Lindsay resulted in the trending hashtag #BlackBachelorette and a doubling of her Twitter following. Twitter told BBC Trending that the micro-blogging site “went wild hearing the news” when it was revealed on the Jimmy Kimmel show, and that within moments there were “more than 36,000 Twitter mentions of Rachel (@therachlindsay)”.

The vast majority of the tweets expressed support for Lindsay.

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Source: BBC | Megha Mohan