How America’s Next Top Model Prepared Me for Trump’s Win
Photo: VH1
When white, blue-collar, middle American workers overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump in November, the narrow victories in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania he scored as a result came as a shock to almost everyone. What was even more shocking, at least to some observers, was the amount of support he received from white women. But, as someone who spent the past several months re-watching America’s Next Top Model, I can tell you that we really should have seen this coming.
The reality competition series, which debuted in 2003, is often a shining example of the divide between conservatives and liberals. The network may have changed over the years from UPN to the CW and, most recently, to VH1, but the messaging was always the same. If we had been paying better attention, we would have seen white contestants from all over the map making their prejudices loudly known. These weren’t the uneducated hillbillies screaming about their guns—that tends to be our caricature of Trump voters. Instead, these were beautiful, young and typically upper-middle-class white women who brought racism, homophobia, transphobia and a penchant for saying “That’s just how I was raised” into the house.
Of course, this came as no shock to the millions of Americans who are victims of such prejudices daily. But for liberals stuck in a bubble fueled by the echo chamber of their Twitter feed, the show should have been a red flag that America was not as progressive as we like to believe.
Each season (or ‘cycle’ in the world of ANTM), host and executive producer Tyra Banks made her best effort to break beauty molds, embrace diversity and change the way people thought about models and the modeling industry itself. She tried to achieve those goals by regularly casting plus-size models, LGBTQ contestants and girls of every ethnicity. They were always beautiful and, most importantly, they were fierce.
But Banks’ desire for inclusion was not shared by all of the contestants. Each cycle gave viewers endless confessionals and private conversations that put their bigotry on full display. This occurred within the first few episodes of Cycle One, when Robin Manning, a devout Christian from Tennessee, took it upon herself to harshly criticize the lifestyle of Ebony Haith, an openly gay contestant from New York. Manning even refused to leave her room when Haith’s girlfriend came to visit the house, adamant that she remain far removed from any homosexual activity in the house. Other LGBTQ competitors, like Cycle Five’s Kim Stolz and Cycle Eleven’s Isis King, had similar conflicts with fellow contestants.
As the first transgender ANTM contestant, King was constantly defined by her gender during the show. Even in the casting episodes, girls huddled together to discuss how uncomfortable it made them, how “masculine” she looked, and even suggested that she be disqualified. One rival, Clark Gilmer, repeatedly called her a “he” or “he-she” or “it.” Meanwhile, Hannah White had problems with King and the other women of color in the house: Identifying herself as a “stereotypical white person,” she said she didn’t like how loud black people were, didn’t listen to “that” music, and would normally never want to be around someone like King. White eventually cried after being called out as intolerant, probably because she never had been before.
Race was an issue in almost every season of ANTM. “Ghetto,” for instance, was a common term for white contestants to use when they just couldn’t put a finger on why they didn’t quite like a black woman in the house. Banks herself often reminded black contestants not to fall into the “black bitch” stereotype of seasons past, yet seemed, perhaps intentionally, to continue editing those characters into the show. Much has been made about Banks’ attempts to downplay the contestants’ blackness by forcing them to work on their diction, encouraging them to lose their accents, and rarely allowing them to keep their natural hairstyles.
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