Amanda Seales has announced that she will not be renewing her contract as co-host on Fox’s daytime talk show The Real.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
It looks like it’s one and done for The Real’s newest host Seales, who joined Loni Love, Tamera Mowry, Jeannie Mai, and Adrienne Bailon as the show’s fifth host in its fifth season. Viewers contemplated Seales’ placement on the show, many calling her too real for The Real. Nevertheless, Seales announced that she will not be returning for the next season during an Instagram Live with actor friend Brandon Victor Dixon. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
“You know what happened to me today. I’ve arrived because my contract is up at The Real and I did not renew it because it doesn’t feel good to my soul to be at a place where I cannot speak to my people the way they need to be spoken to and the people who are speaking to me, in disparaging ways, are not being handled. I’m not in a space where I can, as a full Black woman, have my voice, and my coworkers also have their voices and where the people at the top are not respecting the necessity for Black voices to be at the top too. So you know, you just reach a point…even when it comes to Hollywood in general, you’ve seen me transform me into a way where I just can’t function in the same way anymore. I just can’t.”
At the beginning of the conversation, Seales described a time when the showrunner of The Real, Rachel Miskowiec, claimed she couldn’t pronounce Ahmaud Arbery’s name and needed Bailon to pronounce it for her. “When I look at white folks like you know, ‘I’m able to do all this, but like,’ it’s like okay. So my producer at The Real, one of my producers at The Real, my showrunner at The Real. When we were doing Ahmaud Arbery when we were talking about that story, she was like ‘um, okay so we’re going to talk about this and um, she was like but um, Adrienne say his name.’ And Adrienne was like, ‘Ahmaud Arbery’ and she was like ‘Right, I just can’t pronounce his name.’ And I’m like ‘You can’t pronounce Ahmaud Arbery?’” She highlighted that Miskowiec herself has a complicated last name, but people make an effort to pronounce it correctly. “I was basically like, ‘You need to learn this now.’”
Later on in the conversation, Seales addressed a viewer that asked if she got fired, and she responded, “I don’t get fired from places, I leave.”
