‘Southern Charm’ has big history problem

Grab your sweet tea, because things just got a whole lot steamier in Charleston, S.C. Recently, Bravo announced that it removed several episodes of its hit reality-tv series “Southern Charm” (which takes place in the iconic port town) from its on-demand channel. Claiming compassion with Black Lives Matter and the greater global civil rights movement, Bravo admits that dialogue in certain episodes is racially charged.

The episodes will be returned, but edited for content. Specifically, scenes where the descendants of powerful South Carolina enslavers and current Neo-confederates make off-hand comments and jokes about slavery and the Civil War will be excised.

Bravo’s decision is a seemingly contrite, culturally-sensitive gesture. However, the real problem is that the fundamental premise of the show is in itself racially charged, based on an ethos of white supremacy and a society built on the backs of enslaved people.

Debuting in 2013, the reality-tv show depicts a gang of wealthy whites enjoying their whiteness and wealth by binge-drinking, polo-playing, yachting, partying, and fornicating, often with each other. They have no discernable responsibilities, and the only problems they encounter involve hangovers, party fouls, and angry boyfriends/ girlfriends. “Southern Charm,” like so many other Bravo shows, can best be described as capitalism porn.

But unlike its sister shows about real estate deals and restaurateurs, “Southern Charm,” has a very big history problem. Several members of the cast are the progeny of antebellum plantation owners and enslavers.

Show-lead Kathryn Calhoun Dennis is a direct descendant of John C. Calhoun, American history’s most notorious defender of slavery whose actions and ideas led to the deaths of more than 800,000 people in the Civil War. Her on-again-off-again partner, Thomas, is the scion of the elite Ravenel family, who owned plantations and humans in South Carolina since before the American Revolution. And William “Shep” Rose is Carolina royalty, coming from a long-line of Boykins, plantation-owners stretching back to colonial times (they even have a breed of dog and a town named after them).

Kathryn, Thomas, Shep and their cohort are still enjoying the privilege and power built by their ancestors on the backs of enslaved people of color. In several episodes, they actually go to their ancestral plantations (or what is left of them) where they jest about the past, throw parties, and get drunk, with no acknowledgment that thousands of people were enslaved, tortured, raped, and murdered on that very spot. Nor do they acknowledge in any way that their own pleasure-filled and bourbon-soaked existence is owed to people of color. To anyone who has any sense of history, or to any viewer who may identify as African-american, the idea of Calhouns and Ravenels carousing like it’s the 1850s is horrifying.

Moreover, the series is set in the cradle of the Confederacy. South Carolina had the densest slave population in the U. S., and Charleston was one of the major ports for the slave trade. Charleston’s wealth was built on the commerce of human flesh flowing up and down the Stono, Cooper, and Ashley Rivers; the cotton and rice brought downstream to be sold in Charleston merchant houses was produced by enslaved people; it was South Carolina whites who defied the U. S. Constitution and threatened disunion in 1832; and it was Charlestonians who attacked the United States at Fort Sumter in 1861, sparking the Civil War. Charleston, despite its current renaissance as a gastronomic retreat, has a profoundly troubled past of human suffering and exploitation.

But even the past isn’t past, as Charleston was also the site of the mass murder of Black Americans at the Emmanuel AME Church in 2015 by white nationalist Dylann Roof. Any portrayal of that location as a place of carefree pleasure and possibility, especially by the direct descendants of the leading proponents of slavery, is a downright dastardly disregard for reality.

In short, there is little that is charming about “Southern Charm.” Almost every aspect of the series — a racist premise, descendants of enslavers engaging in public debauchery, the willful ignorance of South Carolina history — is “racially charged.”

For Bravo to surgically remove individual scenes and segments is to distract from the fundamental problems with the show. If Bravo is truly interested in making amends and respecting the BLM movement, then they should consider canceling the show entirely. Or perhaps, at the very least, bring in some characters of color who have personal connections to Charleston’s dark past. Their understanding of and experiences with “southern charm” would make for interesting viewing indeed. Maybe Bravo should put some reality in its “reality-tv.”