The Bachelor: Whiteness in the Harem Rachel E. Dubrofsky This examination of the representation of whiteness and women of color in the reality- based television series The Bachelor shows how the series is ‘‘raced.’’ It is a context in which only white people find romantic partners, a process that women of color work to facilitate. The Westernized trope of the Eastern harem structures The Bachelor, duplicating in the series the imperialist, Orientalist, and oppressive racist premises of the harem trope. Keywords: Whiteness; Harem; Orientalism; Race; Reality TV; The Bachelor Over the course of the first season of American Idol in the summer of 2002, more people voted by phone to help select a winner than voted in the 2000 U.S. presidential election (Albiniak, 2002, p. 22). Contemporary reality-based programming has captured the attention of TV viewers in the United States, and television scholars have responded accordingly. 1 However, little work on reality-based shows featuring the activities of everyday people focuses on women, although women figure centrally in the reality-based romance genre, or on the intersection of women and race, though people of color figure more prominently in reality-based shows than in scripted shows. 2 This article outlines how The Bachelor is ‘‘raced’’: The series is a context in which only white people find romantic partners, while women of color work to facilitate the coupling of white people. I examine racial stereotypes, racial references, and the ways that narrative structures oppressively regulate the television text. I base my noting of race on visible racial markers and comments by participants about their racial background. Some women are marked by their dark skin or physical features as women of color and are treated as such on the series. Other women who are not explicitly marked physically as women of color but are described with a specific ethnic heritage */for instance, Latin American descent */are marked Rachel E. Dubrofsky is a post-doctoral fellow in Communication at the University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign (UIUC) and a Research Associate at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University. The work is based on her dissertation, completed at UIUC. Correspondence to: Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 228 Gregory Hall, 810 South Wright Street, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. Email: racheldubrofsky@gmail.com. The author thanks Kent A. Ono, Debby Dubrofsky, Linda Steiner, and Susan J. Harewood for their invaluable contributions to this article. ISSN 0739-3180 (print)/ISSN 1479-5809 (online) # 2006 National Communication Association DOI: 10.1080/07393180600570733 Critical Studies in Media Communication Vol. 23, No. 1, March 2006, pp. 39  /56