MadameNoire
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In the first part of The Real Housewives of Atlanta’s season 13 reunion, the ladies sat down in a dungeon-inspired ballroom to discuss everything from Kenya Moore’s shady comments on Porsha Williams’ Black Lives Matter activism to what Drew Sidora’s husband Ralph Pittman was doing for those mysterious three days in Tampa.
During last night’s episode, viewers essentially watched as the cast discussed what went down in the lives of Porsha, Kenya and Drew Sidora. Starting off with Porsha, host Andy Cohen recounted how much the housewife has grown in terms of how she’s chosen to use her platform this season inparticular as a a means of supporting Black Lives Matter and showcasing her increased commitment to social justice.
Porsha’s involment in the movement was one of the shows main plotpoints this season overall, esspecially since not all of her castmates thought her intentions for becoming more vocal in BLM were authenic. Since in the footage we saw Kenya was the the most outspoken person raising questions about Porsha’s activism, last night the two women went head to head. Porsha brought up some really good points regarding how Kenya can be hypocritcal at times when it comes to how she judges her other castmates. For example, at one point during the seaon Kenya made a dig at Porsha by refferencing the latter mistaking the Underground Railroad for an actual railroad that transported slaves in one of her first seasons on the show. According to Porsha, it didn’t makes sense that Kenya would expect to be included in some of the positive things she was trying to do for the BLM movement as a person who’s done the work to educate themselves and grow when behind her back she (Kenya) was still holding her to ignorant mistakes she’d made in the past such as the Underground Railroad blunder.
Even more so, it was pointed out that Kenya’s not the most “woke” out of the bunch either. Essentially, both Porsha and Andy wanted to know who is Kenya to judge Porsha when — as we saw this seaon — Kenya has made her own culturally insenstives mistakes? As they tackled her own personal journey throughout this season, Andy questioned Kenya about why she chose to wear a Native America headress as her costume to Falynn’s Halloween party. In a effort to defend her choice of attire, last night she explained that she thought wearing the headdress was a form of paying homage to her Native American roots and family from West Virgina.
Regardless, Kenya admitted wearing the headpiece was wrong and she apologized for it during the reunion, but to Porsha’s point, she can’t be so expectant of people to forgive her for her mistakes when she doesn’t give that same grace to her castmates of the show and brings up mistakes that made years and years ago admist their efforts to be better people.
With all of that in mind, Kenya’s hypocritical tendancies also came up yesturday night as she went back and forth with Drew. While the two women had a rocky tension between them throughout the season, it was interesting to see the both Kenya and Drew vocalize that they’d felt the other person had talked poorly about their respective marriages. In short Kenya said that Drew made several disparaging comments about her estranged husband Marc Daly, and on the flip side, Drew said that Kenya crossed the line by commenting on her husband’s attractiveness.
Things got even more intense when during the recap of Drew’s storyline, she started crying when her eldest son’s relationship with his biological father came up. As she explained, she said she’d felt Kenya had additionally crossed a boundary by retweeted a post online which said the conversation Drew and Ralph had with the child (Josiah) about his biological father was “cringey.” As Drew pointed out, she was “diaspointed” that Kenya would retweet something that was negative about such a vulnerable and touchy topic that her family had chosen to make public to showcase a very real situation that many other families go through, an she expressed being esspecially hurt since Kenya had commented on a scene that concerned her child. In her eyes, it was hypocritical of Kenya to think retweeting something not nice about her child recconecting with his biolofical father would be okay, but then take offense with her (Drew) saying anything about all the issues she (Kenya) went through in her marriage with Marc on the show.
As a sidenote on Drew outside of her drama with Kenya, we finally got answers from Ralph about what he was doing in Tampa, Florida for those three days where he left he and Drew’s marital home without telling her beforehand that he was going or what he planned to do there. During his time in the hot seat at the reunion, the hubby explained that he’d geuninely needed some time to himself and becuase of that, he’d spent the whole time in Tampa by the ocean, taking himself out to eat, and “running” to get some excercise and clear his mind. Shadily, Kandi Burruss pointed out that she didn’t understand why he needed to go all the way to Tampa to do those things when he could have gone to a number of different beaches that were closer to Atlanta. Relatedly, Andy highlighted that Tampa was one of the stripper captails of the country, and Ralph denied that tidbit of information having any realtion to why he chose to go there for his trip.
All things considered, part one of the reunion was reflective of the season as a whole — pretty much uneventful with petty disagreements being blown out of proportion for some drama. While Porsha, Drew, and even Andy (to an extent) tried to pin Kenya as the hypocritical and problematic villian, Kenya — in true form — stood her ground, issued apologies only if they could be genuine, and essentially displayed why she was sat in one of the two closest seats to middle — the spots reserved for those who brought the most to the season have have to most drama to unpack.
Just before the episode ended, LaToya Ali joined the ladies on stage and came in firing shots with her aim set on Drew. Hopefully she’ll add some more spice to following episodes of the reunion since we have two more parts left. If anything, we still have all of #Strippergate to hear about!
See some of the best tweets from last night’s episode down below.
