Beyond ‘Trash TV’: Love Island has a racism problem.

When I told my mum that my dad is a bigger Love Island fan than I am, she didn’t believe it at first. When I told her that he had watched every season of both the UK and the Australian version, she laughed. My dad, like most dads, historically ridiculed Love Island for its banal superficiality. He is also a news reporter and, therefore, deals with the most serious world events on a daily basis as he deals with his morning coffee. Naturally, my mum thought, how could someone so serious ever like anything as trivial as Love Island? (The obvious clarity lacking here is that my parents are divorced, so my mum has a slightly limited understanding of him anyway.) But I ask: by constantly framing the show as solely meaningless drama, are we overlooking the dangerous behaviours reenacted on screen that pervade the real world?

I started watching Love Island in 2021, much later than most of my classmates. I will admit, even as a 15-year-old, I had a small superiority complex about not watching the show. There was an aloof detachment to this world of plastic boobs and shirtless, oily men (not a terribly inaccurate description, I have to say). But one day, my sister told me to sit and watch the first episode of Season 7, and immediately, I was hooked. I scolded myself for my unbridled Love Island snobbery, lamenting over all the inconsequential drama I could have consumed. (I needn’t have worried, all the previous seasons were on ITVX, available to stream whenever I wanted.) I was a newbie to the show, learning what ‘mugged-off’ meant and how serious it was to take a new girl back from Casa Amor. It was exciting, escapist, and most of all, unserious. Before I knew it, I’d spent the entire summer watching Love Island, and I had reached the final episode. And then, something strange happened.

When I think of the underlying racism that runs rampant in Love Island, I always return to the Season 7 finale. Fourth place was given to Kaz Kamwi & Tyler Cruickshank, a black couple. Third place was Faye Winter and Teddy Soares, a white woman and a dark-skinned black man. Chloe Burrows and Toby Aromolaran, a white woman and a light-skinned black man, took second place. And first place was awarded to Millie Court and Liam Reardon, a white couple. I joked to my sister, Look, they’ve literally gone from least white to most white, ridiculing the blatant racial preferences of UK voting habits. Initially, it was not much more than a quip. I didn’t have any proof that the UK was voting based on race and skin colour – until I kept watching. In the next season, it was the public who voted for which contestants should be paired up before the show started. I was shocked when, immediately, the only four black contestants had all been respectively paired up with each other. The UK was blatantly voting based primarily on race. Being born from an interracial marriage, I was naive in thinking that people didn’t see race in dating. But truthfully, it was Love Island that shocked me into this current reality so coldly.

Cast your mind back to Season 2, when every girl who stepped forward for a boy was chosen by them to couple up with (‘stepped forward for’ meaning, ‘expressed attraction to’, for non-Love Island viewers). Every girl except for Malin Andersson, the only woman of colour in the line-up. She repeatedly stepped forward for four boys, the last of whom outwardly expressed his disinterest in Malin by choosing to couple up with/steal a girl who wanted to stay with her current partner. My friend and I were shocked. ‘But she’s the best looking one in there!’ we angrily exclaimed. Whether that was true or not (beauty is subjective, of course), there was no denying the blatant reason for Malin’s rejection. She was not white. Women of colour constantly feel as if we have to try harder, look prettier, be cooler than our white contemporaries, because we know we are at a disadvantage in a world that favours a Eurocentric aesthetic.

We must remember, though, that the world of Love Island is artificial. Reality TV is at once (supposedly) a portrayal of unscripted raw emotions and also an intentional crafting of entertainment. This blurs the extent to which we can use shows like Love Island as reflections of our everyday reality. Love Island is not and has never been known for its diversity, a fact especially prevalent during an increase in advocating for diverse representations on screen throughout the last decade. Today, especially in multicultural cities like London, interracial romance is nothing out of the ordinary. However, Love Island perpetuates the same disregard for women of colour, a problem that in many cases, is not too estranged from the real world.

Originally, I wanted to focus on the prevalence of both racism and misogyny within the Love Island universe. But (seen by the thousands of OfCom complaints made about the male contestants’ disgusting treatment of women every year), the problem of misogyny is widely noted by audiences, unlike the discrepancies of how contestants of colour are treated compared to their white counterparts. The so-called ‘trash’ culture that defines reality TV often suggests that we should dismiss it altogether, but in this case, the trivial case of entertainment teaches us how casual racism is still overlooked even when it is directly exposed on a screen.