Love Island's Chelley & Olandria Call Out Racist "Mean Girls" Comments

Now that Olandria Carthen and Chelley Bissainthe have exited the Love Island USA villa, they are finally able to see what viewers have been saying about them. And it hasn’t all been positive. Despite both women finding strong romantic connections in Season 7 and leaving in fan-favorite couples, they also received some backlash over their interactions with fellow islander Huda Mustafa. Olandria and Chelley have seen the comments calling them “mean girls,” and pointed out how this perception is heavily influenced by racial prejudice.

During their July 22 interview on the Baby, This Is Keke Palmer podcast, Olandria and Chelley spoke about the challenge of being the only two Black women to remain in the villa for the whole season. “How often did you feel you had to tone down as a Black woman on a TV show?” host Keke Palmer asked them. “It’s like ‘If I just say a peep or something, it’s now...’

“Taken out of context,” Olandria chimed in. “And now I’m a bad guy. Now I’m a mean girl. It’s very exhausting to say the least. I truly feel me and Chelley had to tone down a lot to not cross over that boundary. Because a person that look the opposite of us, soon as they get emotional, it’s like, ‘Oh, we’re going to cater to this person.’ Like bro, what about us?”

Specifically, Keke brought up a moment early in the season when Olandria told Huda to stop making comments about the other relationships in the villa during a recoupling ceremony. The podcast host then alluded to Huda’s profanity-filled reaction after her separation from Jeremiah Brown. “We’ve seen people cuss people full out,” Keke said. “But let me and her move like that,” Olandria added.

Keke pointed out how societal perception is skewed when a Black person expresses their anger: “They’re subtle microaggressions. Just because I’m saying something sternly doesn’t mean you need to be afraid of me. That’s rooted in something that’s anti-Black.” Olandria agreed: “If it was someone else not looking like us who acted like whatever, they wouldn’t be getting as much backlash at all.”

For Chelley, the negativity was surprising since it was the polar opposite of how the people who actually spent time with her on the island had felt. “Everyone who was in that villa will tell you that they could always come to us for the best advice, to come vent to us, we’re so level-headed, we’re so honest, we’re so loving, we bring everybody a peace of mind, this and that,” Chelley said. “So, to know how your fellow islanders feel versus coming to the internet and seeing ‘mean girl,’ ‘disrespectful,’ ‘angry,’ this and that. I’m like, ‘Wow, you all really don’t know us.’”