Doomed from the start: ‘Bachelor’ star forced now-ex-girlfriend into racial struggle session

After four years of dating, “Bachelor” star Matt James and the woman who won his heart, Rachael Kirkconnell, have called it quits.

But this isn’t just any viral breakup.

Rather, it’s one tainted — and likely fueled — by the racist anti-racism trope that has plagued America since the George Floyd protests of 2020.

James was the “Bachelor” franchise’s first-ever black bachelor, and immediately after his choice of Kirkconnell was made public, “racially insensitive” photos from her past began surfacing on social media. Those photos included her attending an antebellum plantation-themed party at her Georgia college while wearing a hoopskirt.

“Everyone said in light of all the craziness going on that that was racist, that that was white supremacist, even though they weren’t celebrating slavery. It had nothing to do with race. The South isn’t inherently racist. It’s not inherently about slavery,” Allie Beth Stuckey of “Relatable” comments.

Rachael then posted an apology to her Instagram, admitting that her ignorance was racist and that she was wrong — but that wasn’t enough for James.

“When I questioned our relationship, it was on the context of you not fully understanding my blackness, and what it means to be a black man in America, and what it would mean for our kids when I saw those things that were floating around the internet,” James said in Kirkconnell’s 2021 struggle session, recorded for all to see on ABC.

“And it broke my heart, because this is the last conversation I thought we’d be having. I had to take a step back for you to put in that work that you outlined that you needed to do, and that’s something you got to do on your own, and that’s why we can’t be in a relationship,” he added.

“So you have to do the work because you wore a dress in 2018 and you went to some antebellum party in 2018, even though he knows her now and says that he loves her and loved her enough to be on a path toward marriage,” Stuckey comments.

James and Kirkconnell then got back together, but now, at 28 and 33, they have decided to go their separate ways — which James used to post a public prayer about their breakup on his Instagram.

“He is just kind of stringing her along and playing husband and wife without actually making that commitment,” Stuckey says, “and then at the end of it all, posting a public prayer after he had already taken her through the public humiliation ritual of calling her a racist on TV.”

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