Are Drag Race fans racist?
This question has been pushed to the forefront of the fandom's mind after many of the show's black queens have spoken up. Throughout Season 10, The Vixen tried to fend off a villain's edit when she realized her clapbacks would be interpreted by the cameras as aggressive, but ultimately still managed to receive one. Asia O'Hara defended herself earlier this week against racist fans and took a social media break after her life was threatened. Season 8 Winner Bob the Drag Queen and Season 10's Monet X Change both took to Twitter to point out the disconnect between performance on the show and popularity.
We decided to pull up some receipts.
We tallied the number of Instagram followers of every queen who placed in the top half of their RuPaul's Drag Race and All Stars seasons to see just how the numbers played out.
Of all 67 of the top half performing queens, 32 are white, 18 are black, 12 are Latina, and 5 are Asian. (Just to clarify, we categorized white passing queens as white, including Trixie Mattel and Violet Chachki.) Tyra Sanchez, Kenya Michaels, and Rebecca Glasscock are inactive on Instagram and were excluded from this survey.
The average number of Instagram followers between the remaining 64 contestants is 558,758. That number takes on a new tone when you break it down by race.
White queens average 622k followers while black queens end up much lower than the average at 418k. The five Asian queens blow past the white queens with Kim Chi herding the pack with a whopping 1.4 million followers. Just passing the average mark at 653k is Season 3 winner Raja.
The ten Latina queens are closer to the average but are given a large boost by Valentina, Adore Delano, and Bianca Del Rio's huge followings. The other seven are much lower with Carmen Carrera coming closest at 441k.
As Bob the Drag Queen noted, no competing black queens (not even Bob) have surpassed one million followers, while one Asian queen (Kim Chi), two Latina queens (Bianca, Adore), and eight white queens (Trixie, Sasha, Alaska, Katya, Alyssa, Violet, Pearl, Courtney Act) have.
Only six of the seventeen black queens even crossed that average marker of 569k followers (Shangela, Shea Coulee, Bob the Drag Queen, Naomi Smalls, Latrice Royale, and Tatianna), while just over half of the white queens have, including two in Season 10 (Aquaria, Miz Cracker).
One could argue it's unfair to include queens like Trixie Mattel and Alaska in this data when they've technically been on two seasons of the show. We used this same data to look at the All Stars queens, and the stats don't fare much better.
Of the 15 top half performers on All Stars 1, 2 and 3, eight are white, three are black, three are Latina, and only one (Jujubee) is Asian.
The average follower count among those 15 contestants is 580,487. The only non-white queen to pass that marker is Shangela, while four of the eight white queens have over 1 million.
The discrepancies become especially shocking when you begin to compare followers counts. Look at queens like Kennedy Davenport and Thorgy Thor, who have both appeared on All Stars 3 earlier this year and Season 7 and 8 respectively, yet Kennedy has less than half of Thorgy's followers. In fact, Kennedy, who is technically the All Stars 3 runner-up, has the lowest number of followers of her best performing Season 7 and All Stars 3 sisters.
Based on the data, one could certainly argue that Drag Race fans have their preferences, and they usually exclude even the most successful black queens. Fans are no exceptions to racial biases, and hiding behind this idea that we simply just like who we like or so-and-so just works harder ignores how we're all socialized to champion whiteness and discount people of color.
One could also argue that Instagram favors younger, more media-savvy queens who interact with their fans. But when you look at the top six of Season 10, Monet X Change and Asia O'Hara have an average of 150,000 less followers than Kameron Michaels, Aquaria, Eureka, and Miz Cracker.
We can assume the fans aren't going to consciously change, so how can the producers solve the show's race problem? While the diversity of Season 10 was a good start, Drag Race has to actively make the contestant pool more diverse AND, as The Vixen pointed out, have challenges that celebrate that diversity. Instead of three seasons of Cher and Madonna challenges, what do we have to do to get a Grace Jones or a Whitney Houston runway? Or an acting challenge based on the blockbuster film Selena?
Hopefully, RuPaul is listening - and taking notes.
