This year’s Love Island All Stars got off to a very promising start for its Black contestants. Off the top, we had three Black contestants, Shaq, Whitney and Leanne, as opposed to the prescriptive one Black man, one Black woman usually cast. Another pleasant surprise was that the Black contestants were not instantly coupled up together, by choice or by public vote. Bombshell Scott made a beeline for Leanne immediately, while Whitney and Boyzone nepo baby Jack Keating seemed to hit it off, and Shaq started getting to know… everyone, reciprocally.
I was happily plodding along, gorging on this year’s iteration of my favourite guilty pleasure show, shocked but satiated by reality TV minus the societal racism that has plagued nearly every other season. Until last Friday.
During a game of Never Have I Ever at the fire pit, Whitney, who is known for defending her friends, being straight-talking and hilarious, came under fire from not one, but three people in the villa.
First, Whitney said it had been Belle’s decision not to kiss Shaq, who was getting to know both Belle and Helena, earlier that day. Whitney based this on what Belle had told her before she “pulled” Shaq: that she would not be kissing him. Shaq disagreed and explained it had been a mutual decision. “Okay, I was wrong,” Whitney said after hearing what Shaq had to say. Shaq was still unhappy, and later used this exchange to berate Whitney in front of other islanders and denounce her friendship.
After this uncomfortable exchange, Whitney was called out for forgetting one of her love interests’ names by one of her closest friends, Jess. “Never have I ever forgotten anyone’s name in the villa,” the question asked, and Whitney drank. “Whitney!” Jess laughed. “I’ve already drank, thanks ‘sis’,” Whitney replied sharply. “Elaborate!” giggled Jess. “What kind of friend are you?” Whitney asked, clearly not in on the joke. “Stop arguing,” other cast members began to say to Whitney. “I’m not arguing, I’m disagreeing with how someone is moving, learn the difference,” she said.
Finally, Whitney dared to defend her friend AJ, who had already been dumped from the villa, when Shaq revealed to the group that he had dubbed AJ’s touchiness an ‘ick’. Shaq was instantly irate with Whitney. When responding, he wouldn’t look directly at her. Kieran jumped in to Shaq’s defence, and when Whitney responded (with her inside voice, might I add) to Kieran, Shaq said, “Why are you shouting at him?” Whitney, well aware of the implications of being perceived as ‘shouting’, replied, “How am I shouting… Why are you making me seem like I’m shouting?” When another contestant, Samie, reiterated Whitney’s point, Shaq's entire demeanour changed, as he began to calmly explain his ‘ick’ comment. “See how he speaks to Samie… but to me he’s on some gangster sh*t,” Whitney said of his change in tone.
Whitney decided to leave the game at this point.
Watching this as a Black woman was equal parts infuriating and upsetting, a sentiment reiterated by Black creators across TikTok. Unofficial Love Island correspondent Sarel (AKA Coco Sarel) captioned her nightly debrief, “Sorry for the low energy tonight, today’s episode was exhausting to watch.” “I would’ve cried,” she starts her video. “Out of anger and out of genuine like ‘Wow, you’re all coming at me, and I actually haven’t done anything wrong.’”
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As a viewer, I found the way Whitney was spoken to upsetting but unsurprising. When a Black woman takes up space, she is quickly labelled with negative stereotypes like loud, aggressive, and argumentative. You see this when Shaq accused her randomly of shouting, and when others accused her of arguing, and in her visceral rejection of both accusations. As a Black woman, all it takes is for someone to label you as something, and then you instantly become an aggressor to onlookers. The words associated with vocal Black women are not the same as those applied to white women with similar characteristics, which is exactly what Whitney was signalling when she said, “See how he speaks to Samie.” Black women are not afforded the same right to challenge, to question, to speak out as their white counterparts.
After Whitney left the game, she spoke to Jess, her friend, who she felt had been piling onto her during the game. Jess kept explaining that she was just having a laugh, not understanding when Whitney said what she needed in that moment was support from a friend, not to be the butt of a joke. “I feel like when you can see the environment is getting intense… as my friend, see beyond the front.” Masking pain can feel like second nature to women of colour, whose character is always one wrong comment, or even one decibel, away from being labelled rude, loud and aggressive.
When they reconciled, Jess admitted that maybe she doesn’t feel the need to stick up for Whitney because Whitney is so good at standing up for herself, whereas Jess is slower to defend herself, which is why Whitney is always stepping in to Jess’s defence. GIRL. Black women need support too. The world has forced us to be our own biggest advocates, but, simultaneously, I find, judge, jury, and executioner of our own character, too. When your motivations and character are so often called into question, it becomes hard not to look inwards. Am I scary? Am I intimidating? Am I aggressive? Your friends will tell you no, you’re funny, you’re supportive. But constantly seeing the good in yourself in a world that wants to convince you that you are bad is exhausting.
At the same time that Whitney was first speaking to Jess, Shaq was rallying a hate campaign against Whitney in the kitchen. “Shaq’s so angry his cheeks were burning,” Ian Sterling, the show’s commentator, said. “I’m so disappointed in his behaviour,” Sarel noted. “I don’t understand how he’s pacing up and down in the kitchen, with vigour and anger and vitriol… It didn’t warrant all of that.” Season five winner Amber Gill reiterated this in a TikTok, saying, “I had to find the clips to find out what she said because I’m like, whoa, it must have been horrendous. Please, everyone needs to get a grip.”
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In the height of this anger, Shaq decided to confront Whitney. Just off the back of an unresolved conversation with Jess, Shaq approached an exhausted Whitney, hands flailing, swear words rushing out of his mouth, physically towering over her, on the attack. This, for me, was the most traumatic part of the episode to watch, and I believe that if Whitney were a white woman being approached in this way by a man, this would have received floods of Ofcom complaints. Whitney attempts to diffuse the situation, but to no avail.
Once Shaq is done verbally abusing Whitney, her love interest, Jack, comes to find her. I had hoped Jack would be looking to comfort his partner. But oh no. “I just didn’t think you needed to come across that way,” he said. My heart dropped. “It wasn’t nice to hear.” How about ‘are you okay’, Jack? It's one thing to not publicly defend her in the moment, but to not even check in on her after the fact, to instantly park blame at her door, to berate her for being dramatic when she’s literally on bloody Love Island. It was too much. The following day, Jack and Whitney were speaking, and when Whitney tried to explain her version of events, he said, “I don’t even want to hear the story,” confirming that he had already made up his mind about who she is and her motivations behind how she acted.
Now, I’ll be the first to say that Whitney is opinionated and unapologetically herself, which can create drama. But are we forgetting this is Love Island? Amber Gill weighed in on this, saying, “Everyone is allowed to have an opinion, and this girl [Whitney] puts her two cents in and everyone’s jumping on top of her, attacking her.” Last year’s third-place contestant, Yasmin, during a livestream with Season Ten contestant Tyrique, said, “They just can’t deal with a loud outspoken woman.” Tyrique responds, “In this country, if you are a person of colour… and you’re loud, you’re outspoken, they’ll tell you you shouldn’t be like that… If you’re Black, they don’t like you to be confident. That’s the facts.”
Whitney did well not to mention race during this entire debacle, lest she be accused of playing the race card, but I’ll say it for her. The entire episode was permeated with the same racism that underscores every Black woman’s experience in England. Whether it’s dating, at work, or in friendship groups, you’re constantly, subtly told to shrink and be quiet. Racism always crops up in Love Island because it is a microcosm, a niche one but one nonetheless, of our society, which is riddled with racism. It may have been subtle, undetectable to the untrained eye, but that entire episode was full of microaggressions, racially charged language and prejudice against Whitney's character.
But in the way she carried herself, I saw strength, poise and class. “Whitney’s composure needs to be studied,” Sarel said in her debrief, and I would be first to sign up for that class.
Hold my bronzer, babe.
