Amanda Seales Reveals Why She Left ‘The Real’
After announcing that she would be departing from the daytime talk show The Real in June, Amanda Seales is now opening up on why she chose not to renew her contract six months after joining the show as the fifth co-host.
"I left The Real because it was breaking my spirit ... I was being asked to not talk about certain things that felt like a betrayal to my people," the 39-year-old comedian said in an Instagram Live conversation on August 1 with The Neighborhood Talk 2.
"And then on top of that, I didn't want to be somewhere that I felt like people weren't being honest with me and where people felt scared of me because of my Black woman-ess."
Speaking on one experience that rubbed her the wrong way while on set, Seales shared that she became upset after a white female producer was assigned to help her put together a Smart, Funny and Black segment on the show.
The game, created by Seales, tests player’s knowledge on Black pop culture based on the variety show.
"They assigned it to the one white woman producer, but we have three Black women producers and one Black guy producer and I was like 'Why are you producing this?'” Seales said. “She was like, '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.' "
Seales said that she felt that a Black producer would have been more suitable to take on the assignment since they would be more familiar with the community.
However, Seales alleges that the segment incident ended with the producer crying to another staff member claiming that she was verbally attacked by Seales.
"I couldn't stay in a place like that," she continued.
Once her contract was up at The Real, Seales expressed that renewing it just did not feel right.
"It doesn't feel good to my soul to be at a place where I can not speak to my people the way they need to be spoken to," she said. "And where the people that are speaking to me in despairing ways are not being handled."
She continued to say: "I'm not at a space where, as a full Black woman, I can have my voice and my co-workers 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."
