Born in Provo, Channeling Compton

The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and the Spectacle of White Womanhood

Listen.
I love reality TV.
Unironically. Fully. With my whole chest.

Not in that “guilty pleasure” way. Not in the “it’s my background noise while I do the dishes” way.
No. I watch it. I analyze it. I live in it.
It is my favorite sport. My modern American folklore. My messy best friend.

And Secret Lives of Mormon Wives?
Babyyyyyy. This show is reality TV in its purest, most terrifying form.
It’s giving trauma dump chic. It’s giving white women in athleisure with too many hair extensions meets TikTok therapy-speak.

I devoured Season 2. Still am. I didn’t stumble into it.
I clicked play on purpose.
But y’all — one scene almost made me throw my whole TV across the room.

Let me set the stage:

We’re mid-episode. Jen — a blonde (Aren’t they all blonde? I swear I need to keep Google on standby so I can remember which one is which.) with deep trauma, $700 extensions, and the energy of someone who owns several crystal water bottles — is arguing with her husband. He’s awful, by the way. Ghost-colored. Misogynist. Obsessed with Chip ’n Dale dancers in a way that gives “I’m doing this for clout”… one hopes… The kind of man who sunscreen was literally invented for.

They’re going back and forth. She’s trying to sound tough. So what does she do?

She puts on a blaccent.
Full-on caricature.
And says — I kid you not — “I was raised in the hood.”

This woman was born in Provo, Utah.

Her husband, in one of the very few moments he’s ever said something correct, blinks and says: “You were born in Provo.”

And Jen, undeterred, goes:
“Yeah, but I grew up in the hood.”

When I tell you I paused that TV and stared into space like I had just seen a vision of Harriet Tubman standing next to me, shotgun at the ready.

This moment is a perfect little capsule of everything this show — and so much of white woman-centered reality TV — reveals and repeats.

These women are supposedly "breaking free."
They're doing therapy.
They're rejecting patriarchal dogma.
They're learning to name their trauma.
They're dancing terribly on TikTok and calling it embodiment.

But when push comes to shove?
When they want to access rage?
Power? Assertiveness?
Toughness?

They reach for Blackness.
Not in solidarity.
Not with understanding.
But as a costume.

Because that’s what a blaccent is, right?
A borrowed voice.
A caricature of a culture used whenever white women want to sound “hard” or “real” or “not the one.”

It’s not a compliment. It’s not quirky. It’s not harmless.
It’s tired.
It’s racist.
And it’s everywhere.

People love this show because these women are allegedly “challenging gender norms” in the Mormon church. Because they’re “speaking up” and “healing” and “reclaiming their identities.”

And I want to hold space for that. I do. I love it for them. Tell those church elders (and youngers) what’s what. Tell Brigham Young to shove it sideways in his garments. Go soak somewhere else, Elijah.

They are deeply traumatized people. Many were married off young, taught silence as survival, and are now raising entire armies of children while unpacking trauma that should have been dealt with before the TikTok debut.

But healing doesn’t mean you get to cosplay Blackness.

You do not get to reclaim your voice in a dialect you’ll never be criminalized for.
You do not get to mimic toughness using a voice you were taught to ridicule.
You do not get to use Blackness as a narrative arc for your own liberation while ignoring the systems that make actual Black women unsafe every single day.

I’m going to keep watching.
Of course I am.
I’m a reality TV girlie, through and through. And, like I said, I love it.

But I’m always watching with a side-eye, a deep breath, and the urge to throw something every time I hear a white woman say “I’m not confrontational, but…” and then launch into a recycled Love & Hip-Hop monologue with a fake Atlanta accent.

If you want to heal, heal.
But leave Blackness out of it.
We’ve already done enough heavy lifting.