The Social Assassination of Ciara Miller | why West and Amanda defenders get it wrong

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]The defensive posture that everyone is going through is that Sierra didn't matter enough to West and Amanda to figure into their calculus of whether they were going to date or not. If it's true that both of these people, knowing how deeply it would hurt Sierra for them to enter into this relationship, chose to do it anyway, it means that Sierra must be such a non- entity, such a nonperson to them as to be socially dead. Can you kind of see where I'm going and why this is worse? That is so dehumanizing that she is not even a thought to them in the process of them deciding to do something that they both know would hurt her on a deep and spiritual level. Much of the reaction to the Summerhouse reunion has been about the supposed tone policing of Sierra Miller on the part of both the white cast of Summerhouse and the audience.

[00:00:56]But I would argue that what's happening is actually much more sinister than just tone policing. And it is more akin to a social assassination.

[00:01:04]Something that is furthering the social assassination that Amanda and West committed against Sierra when they chose to enter their relationship in the brazen manner that they did. A lot of what I've been hearing too is this idea that it's embarrassing that Sierra is going so hard at this reunion. She's embarrassing herself by showing how much she cared about West and by continuing to believe and continuing to perpetuate the notion that the only reason that West got with Amanda was to spite her or was as revenge against Sierra. And the assumption there is that he never cared enough about her to want to spite her.

[00:01:39]And people mean that in a well-meaning way. I think I think they are sincerely thinking, well, it's not as bad because he didn't care about her enough to want to get revenge on her. But I think it's actually worse if he never cared about her enough to want to get revenge on her. It's actually worse if Amanda was not thinking about Sierra at all when she decided to go sleep with her ex who traumatized her both romantically and racially. When people either defend Amanda and West or dig at Sierra by pointing out the fact that neither of them cared enough about her to consider her in the choices that they were making. I think what they're trying to do is to remove some of the malice from the situation. and they're trying to fight back against people in the audience like me. Hi. Who are saying that this is a very evil thing to do? We are people who would say that this is something that is just as bad if not worse than Scandaval because at least in Scandaval you were dealing with two idiots who genuinely like this was a tried andrue thing that Tom Sandaval had done prior. He was just trying to do it again. And while there were very evil elements to what him and Rachel did to Ariana, the racial component is what makes this situation different and more sinister. It's what makes it even more violent because I do believe that what Tom and Rachel did to Ariana is violent, but we will get into that. I've been trying to figure out why I've found that mostly white people, not all, but mostly white people, are identifying this situation as one that was not malicious.

[00:03:12]They're trying to say Amanda and Wes are just stupid people who decided that they were going to sleep together and didn't think about the consequences of their actions. Intent versus impact, and how impact matters more than intent. And yet people continually fall back on this it wasn't intentional argument when they when they are trying to minimize or fight against a massive public backlash that is happening. There's this bristling against retribution, a bristling against people identifying a wrong that was done and wanting it to be corrected by the parties who did wrong.

[00:03:48]It's of a piece with the defenses of racist actions that essentially amount to, well, they didn't mean it that way.

[00:03:56]as though whether somebody meant something to be racist is the defining characteristic of whether that action or thing is racist or not. And I think this is mostly because white people think racism is wrong primarily because it is mean or rude or uncou and not because it is violent. Even when it doesn't involve physical harm to another being, it is violent in the impact that it has on that person's soul. I was trained in social justice from a young age and we go off of Martin Luther King Jr's definition of violence which is anything that is harmful or hurtful to the growth of a human being. And within that framework, you can see how something as innocuous as two people dating, taken completely out of context, stripped of all of its context, how this can become a violent act when you put into context the impact that it is having on that particular black woman. And that's not to say that the impact it's having on Kyle isn't as important, but it is to say that Kyle was thought of in the scenario. There are a lot of people who are celebrating her getting her lick back on her husband, her partner of 10 years who publicly cheated on her on season four of Summerhouse and was rumored to have been cheating on her throughout their relationship by getting with a younger guy, particularly getting with a younger guy who was for some ungodly reason quite a hot commodity.

[00:05:24]And people assume that Kyle is important enough to Amanda for her to want to be vindictive, for that to be an underlying motivation to her relationship with West. And that is an understandable vindictiveness that is folded into this that is not accepted in the same way for Sierra because people are almost saying Sierra is not significant enough to either Amanda or West for her to have figured into the situation. When I talk about social assassination, I'm picking up on Orlando Patterson's theory of social death. One of my favorite creators, Erica Hart, who I will tag hopefully, actually made a video about social death and the Kevin Hart roast.

[00:06:04]That's great. You should go check it out. I'm stretching Patterson a little by taking the analysis out of the world of American child slavery and expanding it to the antilack white supremacist world system as a whole and arguing that that system arguing that that system is not merely legal. It's not just economic. But it is, as Patterson says, one of the most extreme forms of the relation of domination, approaching the limits of total power from the viewpoint of the master and total powerlessness from the viewpoint of the slave, a system that is such a totalizing form of domination as to make black people socially non-existent or dead to society. In short, if Amanda is saying that Sierra did not figure into her calculations about whether or not it would be a good idea to be in a relationship with West, they can do anything and they don't even think about her because she does not exist to them.

[00:07:01]Even with Sierra having been Amanda's number one champion for the past six years, she might have criticized her now and again, but she absolutely was her number one rider. even with and I would argue even more so than Paige Dorbo because and we I can make a whole video about white womanhood and white women's friendships but the relationship there is never going to be the same because they are not trained to have friends.

[00:07:27]They are trained to have allies who they go through life with until the event that there might be a desirable man who is worthy of dropping those alliances and abandoning your friends for. But I will digress. Sierra's support of Amanda was not information. It was not evidence of her humanity. It was actually something that she took for granted because of her view of Sierra as a black woman. I made a video already about how I think that and approached Sierra as though Sierra was Mammy and Amanda was Scarlett O'Hara. You can check my page for that. But you can say a very similar thing about Wes's friendship with KJ, right? KJ mentions that he was hospitalized over the fall time and he talks specifically about Sierra and Mia visiting him in the hospital. But West, his supposed good friend, someone who he thought he was as close to as a brother, he doesn't mention him coming to the hospital or even sending him a text message after this whole scandal broke.

[00:08:22]Wes thought enough about Kyle, his bro whose wife he was sleeping with, to text him after the scandal broke and to continue to attempt to mend a relationship with him. But KJ didn't even cross his mind once. He didn't even text him until after KJ called him out at the reunion. He doesn't exist to West as a person. Black people do not exist to these people as people. We don't exist to the audience. If we can live in a world where Sierra saying something like this, the truth about her friend of six years who she has watched time and time again betray herself for the validation of men, silence herself, make herself smaller in exchange for a crumb of male attention and who she has tried to build up so that she would not continue to do that and continue to live a life where she is subsisting off of the drips and drabs of attention that she can get from the particularly white men around her. For her to compile all of those six years of observations into this one precise read and for people to see this as significantly more violent and mean, rude, uncou and West did to Sierra. That tells me that this is about more than tone policing. This woman is not a human being. Not only to the audience, but also to Amanda and West. There are going to be a lot of people who watch this video and say, "Oh, it's not that deep.

[00:09:50]You're taking it way too far." Or who think I'm progressive. I'm lefty. I have black friends. But I do think that Amanda and West are just two dumb idiots who were too stupid to think about Sierra before they decided to sleep together and then release a statement about it. I've seen a lot of people on Reddit say Sierra has a pattern of doing things like this, of acting like she owns, that's a very loaded word to use when you're talking about a black woman and white men that she's dating. But again, let's pretend like it's not that deep, acting like she owns the men that she hooks up with. And I once again say that response requires this situation to be so devoid of context as to be absolutely meaningless. If you can truly argue that Sierra is unreasonable for being upset that her best friend is sleeping with an ex who traumatized her, then you must also think that Amanda should have just stayed with Kyle because they're married anyway. It doesn't matter if he cheats. It surely can't be the same people banging the drum about how Bailey is such a cool girl boss for defending herself against Ben. Because under your logic, doesn't matter that Ben had a girlfriend the whole time or whe if he had a girlfriend the whole time. Him and Bailey were just flirting. she doesn't own him. I see this need to defend bad behavior and to defend people who are getting online backlash most clearly when we're talking about reality TV. But if you want to go to the extreme, we can think about how Donald Trump built an entire cult of personality with a bunch of sickopantic freaks who want nothing more than to defend his right to be hateful with impunity. He says, "Grab them by the P word." They show up at rallies wearing t-shirts saying, "I can't wait for you to grab me by the P-word." That defensiveness against retribution and shamelessness in the face of wrongdoing are both characteristics of American individualism and white supremacist culture in particular. White supremacist cultures function under a logic of possessive individualism. This is the idea that the self is sovereign and freedom is the absence of obligation to others. You see that spoken about in one of the founding documents of the United States, the Declaration of Independence.

[00:11:58]But the philosophers who inspired the founding fathers rightfully understood that complete and total freedom would lead to anarchy. Was it John Lock who said life would be nasty, brutish, and short? Or was that Thomas Hobbes? And so they invent this idea of the social construct. You exchange a bit of your personal freedom, a bit of your self- sovereignty in order to maintain the equilibrium and peace in the world around you. You are not free to commit acts of unaliving on the streets against anybody who you decide to because the state structure is going to protect you.

[00:12:32]And if you violate that contract, you get punished. Which is why a lot of people are responding to the ones who say, "Well, Amanda and West are free to do whatever they want with saying, when has it ever when has it ever been the case that anyone is always free to do whatever they want?" Because it never really has. But this social contract was always racially bounded. It was always contingent. The people who were founding our country and who were founding the white supremacist society that we live in never considered that a person who looks like Sierra would even be anything other than property. That I would even be referencing her as a person because I too would not be a person. the obligation structure that we are all taught to stop us from committing random acts of anarchy throughout the streets that was never meant to extend to people like me and Sierra. The idea that you have a duty to others to protect others and to limit yourself and your ability to express yourself for any reason that you decide to. Yeah, we we are not considered as others. Sierra was not considered as another. And so it makes sense that West and Amanda not only would be willing to date one another knowing the reaction that Sierra would probably have that they could have just not even thought about her. For Amanda to sit on that stage and look Sierra in the face and first off say off and be defensive and second off tell her as an a way of justifying her relationship with West. I was having an awakening.

[00:14:00]Like, she's Stella getting her groove back. And Sierra is just the romcom friend who's supposed to be like, "I'm so excited for this awakening for you.

[00:14:09]Can't wait. Doesn't matter that it's emotionally devastating to me because everything is about you." Sierra was never Amanda's friend. And it's not just because she's a black woman. It's also because Amanda and white women who operate like her can never have friends.

[00:14:24]In this framework, friendship is not a covenant. It's an alliance that something that only holds until it is broken by the potential for male attention because they understand that partnership with white men, particularly desirable white men, is currency. It's real social currency. Ruth Frankenberg talks about how white women's social identities are arranged more coherently around their relationships to white men than their own relationship to their womanhood in a way that prevents them from being able to really coalition build with other women. And I think that is where the language of friendship is different between Amanda and Sierra.

[00:15:02]Amanda explaining her awakening is supposed to register for Sierra because if it was another white woman, she would say, "Well, of course you're having an awakening. You found a you finally found a good white man. You deserve to have this happy moment." But in Amanda's mind, all Sierra can think about is herself. All Sierra can think about is how she's emotionally impacted, not the fact that Amanda has finally gotten access to the most valuable piece of social currency she can have, which is a good white man. And so in Amanda's mind, Sierra's reaction is just as big of a betrayal. And her honestly weaponizing Amanda's own fears and insecurities and weaknesses and validating them on the reunion stage is also a huge betrayal.

[00:15:47]And there are pro likely a lot of white people and or people who are white supremacy pill at home watching agreeing with Amanda and feeling empathy for Amanda and siding with her because they understand that what Sierra is doing as a betrayal too. That is a betrayal that is legible to them because Sierra is not a person and Amanda is.

[00:16:10]They are furthering the social assassination of Sierra by bulking at her right to be disgusted by the way that her alleged friends treated her and supporting Amanda's right to do whatever she wants to do in the name of gaining access to the oh so precious commodity of white peen. Context doesn't matter to these people because context to them is actually violent. Context strips them from the ability to act with impunity.

[00:16:37]context calls into question their ability to assert their individuality and climb the ladder towards fame for West and towards the pinnacle of white socialite womanhood. I guess for Amanda, that's how people can rationalize Sierra as being the aggressor in this situation. It's not just about the fact that we have this angry black woman stereotype that permeates our culture.

[00:17:02]It's because they are looking at her and watching her and genuinely thinking, "How dare you make this beautiful white woman who has suffered so bad at the hands of this evil white man look bad and feel bad for finally managing to get a good one. That's what we've told her entire life she needs to do is find a good, strong, kind, friendly white man who's going to take care of her. and she's finally managed to do it. She messed up the first time and now you have to come in and say, "Oh, but how dare you do that because it hurt my feelings." Don't you know that you mean nothing to these people? Don't you know that he never liked you in that way?

[00:17:45]Don't you know that you don't need friends when you have a relationship? I feel like in white society, friendship is just a placeholder until you're able to find the relationship of your dreams.

[00:17:55]That's why so many older people are complaining, "Oh, I'm so isolated. Oh, I'm so lonely. I don't have any friends now that I've gotten married and have had kids. That's because the nuclear family is supposed to isolate you. It's supposed to cut you off from networks.

[00:18:09]And that's what Amanda wanted to do with Kyle. She wanted him to buy her that house in New Jersey. She wanted them to leave the show. She wanted them to start stop going out and partying. That's why she's going out and partying now with West because she knows that's what's going to keep West with her. But you better believe there will come a time, and it will be sooner than West believes it will be, where she says, "Okay, it's time for us to go sit down somewhere."

[00:18:31]And they are going to go sit down somewhere and no longer see any of the friends that they're out with every other weekend, no longer be out at the bars, no longer be out partying, and she's going to find a way to completely isolate him because the expectation is that they do that. Amanda saw Kyle as a failure because he literally could not afford to stop and go build this nuclear family with her. The way his businesses were set up, he had to go out and DJ. He had to keep socializing. He had to stay on the show because without any of that, they wouldn't have had enough money coming in. Well, he wouldn't have had enough money coming in. She certainly had enough money coming in. She thought because Kyle was from like a rich family in New Hampshire, that he was dealing with the same like understanding of what life should be and what adulthood should be as her, like having grown up in a rich family in New Jersey. But those are like worlds apart. And it's for a reason. Kyle didn't want a stay-at-home wife. Kyle didn't want someone who was just going to like sit around and spend his money and go shopping. He didn't want to be married to a lady who lunches. He wanted to be married to someone like Ariana Maddox, someone like Brunwin Newport. So someone like him, someone like Sierra, quite frankly, who sees all of this that they are offered from being on this show, from getting to be influencers, from coming from money like Amanda and Kyle did, and chooses to work anyway, chooses to work hard. In Amanda's mind, Kyle is a complete and utter failure as a man because he failed to do the most important thing, which was take care of his wife and make sure that she never had to work or worry about money again. And she wasn't worried about money, but he always was.

[00:20:07]And that's what the failure was. That's why she withheld that rent money from him, not because she didn't want to pay it, but because she didn't feel like she should have had to. She's the wife. He's the husband. He's the one who pays the bills. She's the one who stays at home with her fun money and gets to do whatever she wants with it. And because he was such a failure as a man, she had to go and humiliate him in this way by replacing him with a younger model and wielding her power as a white woman in showing him that she still has it and she can still get someone who's young and hot and desired like West. And I can't emphasize enough that that is because Kyle registers to Amanda as a human being and Sierra does not. Sierra was socially assassinated by both Amanda and West and the audience, or at least the members of the audience, who looked at her pouring her heart out on that reunion stage and having justifiably angry reactions and were absolutely gobsmacked that she would do that. This is a society that is disgusted at the idea of mutual responsibility, at the idea of writing wrongs because a wrong against another, a wrong against a community member is a wrong against oneself. I'm not throwing around white supremacist here as though because people kind of take white supremacy for granted in a way and say, "Well, how else are we going to do it? That's just the way things are. It's not white supremacy. It's just the world." And I'm here to tell you, no, it's not. Because there are a lot of cultures and a lot of communities who do not conduct relationships in this way. There are black women and girls who are in sexual competition with their friends, but we call them out for being weird. We invented terms like pick me because we know that that is weird and it is not the norm. It is not expected. The solution to this is deconstruction of the white supremacist logic of individualism. a logic which is threatened by a simple I'm sorry and a genuine feeling of remorse for one's bad actions that have caused harm to another because those actions were just based in a desire to do what one wanted. It can't be that bad if I'm following my inner calling. That's a logic that allowed an entire audience of people who watch the Valley to excuse Danny assaulting two queer cast members of their show and double down and deify him and his wife and say, "Well, they shouldn't have to apologize. They don't owe Jasmine and Melissa anything." A humanist logic that fights against white supremacy is one that recognizes that the self is only legible through our relations to others.

[00:22:48]And that harm against others is harm against the self. And that a beautiful, kind, caring black woman does not deserve to be further socially assassinated by the audience with whom she shares her life just because she was a little harsh while bearing her soul in response to a social assassination attempt.