One thing we all know and love about Amanda Seales is that she’s always going to keep it real (no pun intended). And while her time on one of our favorite daytime talk shows was short-lived, the comedian is speaking out on what many Black women experience in corporate environments: being labeled as the angry, Black woman.
“I left The Real because it was breaking my spirit,” she shared via a recent Instagram Live with comedian Godfrey. “I was being asked to not talk about certain things that felt like a betrayal to my people and to me as a person. And then on top of that, I didn’t want to be somewhere where I felt like people weren’t being honest with me, where people felt scared of me because of my Black womanness.”
Seales shared a specific incident that happened on set when she was paired with a white producer to bring her live comedy show, Smart, Funny, and Black, to The Real.
“They assigned it to the one white woman producer,” she recalls. “But we have three Black women producers and one Black guy producer. So, I was like, ‘Why are you producing this?’ And she said, ‘Oh because so-and-so assigned it to me.’ And I said, ‘But, why would you be producing this? You’re a white woman. You don’t understand what we’re going to be talking about.’”
“Now, she could have said, ‘Well, actually I grew up in this culture, if that was the case,’” Seales continued. “But I said to her, ‘Do you even know what we’re going to be talking about?’ And she said, ‘No, I just figured you were going to talk about it and I would just write it down.’”
“So I said, ‘Am I going to get a producer credit?’ Because to me, you assign the different segments to people who are going to be able to produce it to the best ability. And it’s like if we were doing a segment on the Sabbath dinner, [and] she was the one Jewish person on staff, she should be in charge of that segment because she has the most expertise on that.”
Seales left The Real after being a co-host for six months. Tamera Mowry-Housley, who had been a co-host since the show’s inception in 2013, also announced she was leaving recently to pursue other opportunities.