Cute Clothes, Ugly Houses

Yet they wear expensive clothes and fight and bicker with each other. As interesting as this train wreck is, none of it actually represents real wealth in my opinion. A lot of it is gaudy, pretentious, and for show. Nene says in her book that she was a fan of Real Housewives of Orange County, but that type of wealth, from that show and Real Housewives of New York, would be what I would have liked to see from the African-Americans portrayed on Real Housewives of Atlanta. If you do not know anything other than what the media would tell you one would think that African-Americans with money are flashy and wear ugly, expensive “Prada like” clothing with one scheme after another.

A multi-million dollar house, Jaguar, Dolce and Gabbana, Versace and Christian Dior cannot buy you class. This just means that you have that new wealth, and are still figuring out what to do with it. The real Housewives series on Bravo always tries to show the socialite scene, and is an advertisement for high society but you cannot go far enough to show the hard work that is involved in maintaining that lifestyle in an hour long television show.

Why isn’t Bravo honest about the fact that these housewives in Atlanta are broke and have homes in foreclosure? It isn’t about living beyond your means. I will look forward to seeing the Real Housewives of DC, for more than a few reasons. For one, I am sick of seeing Atlanta, in general. Most of us know for a fact that there are African-Americans all over the country that are doing well, even in forgotten cities like Philadelphia, so it would be nice to see how we really live. For another, Washington DC has allowed African-Americans to rise through the ranks and do well for themselves. Though the media would like to portray the more sordid side there is also another side in which it may be easier to get ahead by taking advantage of the opportunities there, than it is elsewhere.

Some of us value hard work and take advantages of the opportunities to get an education when they are presented to us. It may take us forever, like 15 years, to get there but when we do we are not interested in the flash of new wealth on the back of a scheme. If you never had anything and actually worked for something you aren’t going to waste it on junk like Dolce and Gabbana; you might find that Polo on sale because it will still be in style 20 years later.

This does not mean that this is the portrayal that Bravo will have on the Real Housewives series when it comes to Washington DC though. If the media representation of African-Americans so far is any indicator, you may not even see us on that series. However I hope that is not the case, and that they actually find someone with class. It is depressing because there are African-Americans with real class and true wealth that have been well off for years before anyone else had ever wanted to move to Atlanta that they could have featured on the show, and they made a conscious decision not to do that with the Real Housewives of Atlanta.

At least the household with ugly houses I saw in the eighties with the aspirational trinkets of wealth were a true representation of where we were going in that time. Not everyone can keep up the lifestyles of recording artists shown on Cribs, which is what the Atlanta series of the franchise seems to have turned into. To be totally fair that is also what happened when Bravo tried out New Jersey, and showed what appeared the be the lifestyle of members of the mafia up there. Cute clothes, ugly houses, and a lot of hard work just to get a piece of the American dream …