In Cathy Park Hong’s autobiographical collection of essays “Minor Feelings,” she explains that “patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it’s more than a chat about race. It’s ontological. It’s like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality.”
With Season 7 of “Love Island USA” wrapped, we’ve seen a number of painful truths about the prejudices and problematic views in our society reflected on the reality TV stage — including, but not limited to, these contrasting perspectives between white people and Asian people that was so apparent in the many reactions to contestant Cierra Ortega’s use of an anti-Asian slur in a 2015 Instagram caption.
We’ve seen a number of painful truths about the prejudices and problematic views in our society reflected on the reality TV stage.
As Hong elicits, Asian people have often had their feelings diminished and made to accept that racism against them is normalized, so when Ortega was removed from the show following the resurfacing of her Instagram posts with the slur, I admit I was surprised. The move seemed to indicate a shift in the normative culture, that what has historically been accepted in the past, would no longer be tolerated.
For once, the Asian community was validated in their experiences of racism, the kind that is often reduced to a “casual form”: the pulling back of eyelids, the mocking of a native language, and of course, getting called a slur that has its origin in targeting Chinese people during the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first U.S. law to restrict immigration based on nationality.
Which is why the irony speaks for itself, as Ortega, who is of Puerto Rican and Mexican descent, claimed in her apology video that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had been called on her family in the backlash of her being bumped from the show.
“I had no idea that the word held as much pain, as much harm, and came with the history that it did or I never would have used it,” Ortega said. “I had no ill intention when I was using it.”
Turns out, some of the people calling her out for using the slur didn’t know the origins of it either. Calling ICE on a Hispanic and Latino household and sending death threats to a person who used a slur is not productive nor will it encourage growth. Both cases, the use of an ethnic slur and the threat of deportation, are anti-immigrant sentiments that feed into the same type of hate and racism that plagues so much of our society.
Throughout this season of “Love Island,” other contestants’ problematic views have surfaced, too. After the first episode, contestant Yulissa Escobar was abruptly removed from the villa, with no official explanation from the show, after clips surfaced of her using racial slurs on a podcast.
Another contestant, Austin Shepard, was called out online for his pro-Trump TikTok reposts and bombshell TJ Palma was found to be following Andrew Tate on Instagram.
On the island, the contestants live in a bubble, an alternate reality where the goal is to focus on one thing and one thing only: finding love without the usual distractions of everyday life and society. All the typical aspects of life such as work and school are removed with the intention to create an “ideal” atmosphere — but what happens when the “outside world” leaks through the cracks?








