Candice Patton says the CW didn’t protect her from racist fans of The Flash
Early backlash to the Black Iris West was treated as just "how fans are," Patton recalls
Yet another Black actor is detailing the failures of their employers to protect them from bigoted backlash. Candice Patton has been vocal about her experience with racist fans of The Flash, and she is one of many CW actresses who banded together to speak on their experiences back in 2020.
Two years later, in a new interview on The Open Up Podcast, she reflected on the lack of support she felt after her groundbreaking casting as the Arrowverse’s Iris West. “It’s a dangerous place to be in when you’re one of the first, and you’re facing backlash for it and there’s no help. Now, people understand a little better and they understand how fans can be racist, especially in genre, and misogynistic. But at the time it was kind of like: ‘Yeah that’s how fans are, but whatever,’” Patton said.
She continued, “Even with the companies I was working with, The CW and WB, that was their way of handling it. We know better now. It’s not okay to treat your talent that way, to let them go through abuse and harassment. But for me in 2014, there were no support systems. No one was looking out for that. It was free range to get abused every single day. There were no social media protocols in place to protect me, so they just let all that stuff sit there.”
The actor admitted to being “severely unhappy” and even wanting “to leave the show as early as season two.” She felt she was “treated differently than other people,” and saw things “happening for my white counterpart that’s not happening to me.”
“[There] has to be people in positions of power who understand my experience and understand the Black experience and the Black female experience who can say, ‘Okay, she needs protection,’” she said. “Any time you hire a minority of any kind you have to be prepared to protect them. In the real world, we are not protected. So just because you put us on a fancy Hollywood set, with the hair and makeup and you assume we’re safe, we are not safe.”
“If I get pulled over at 2 a.m. in Jackson, Mississippi, by a white cop, do you think he gives a shit that I’m Candice Patton from The Flash? It doesn’t matter,” Patton went on. “We still need protection because the world sees us in a certain way. When I step on a set and everyone working around me is white, I’m not protected and I will never be protected. And that’s not to say everyone has bad intentions, but they have blind spots. That can contribute to my harm. It’s been a learning experience for companies and productions.”
“It’s just not enough to make me your lead female and say, ‘Look at us, we’re so progressive, we checked the box,’” she said. “It’s great, but you’ve put me in the ocean alone around sharks. It’s great to be in the ocean, but I can get eaten alive out here.”