Since launching their joint podcast in December, present romantic partners and former GMA3 co-hosts Amy Robach and T.J. Holmes have dished openly about their conflicted feelings about the implosion of their careers and their periods of excessive drinking, but this week, the revelations reached a new level.
On Tuesday, the couple released a podcast episode in which the two had a fight over communication in real time. According to the pair, Robach had not been aware the two were going to be recording that day and Holmes had blindsided her by showing up at her home with microphones and insisted that the two hash it out.
On Thursday’s episode, they unpacked the incident, and Holmes, who is Black, announced that he had debated releasing the Tuesday episode at all due to fears that he would be “viewed as a Black man beating up on a white woman.”
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“I was shocked,” Robach said on Thursday, describing her reaction to Holmes’s concerns. “That would never have crossed my mind. Race, the fact that you’re Black and I’m white would never have crossed my mind.”
“And that’s kind of to your point, you have to think about things that I don’t think about,” she continued. “And honestly, it took me a second to actually get my head around it. And once you explained it, and then once we’ve seen some of the reaction, a light bulb went off for me in a way.”
As much as these kinds of things can sometimes be taken out of context, it really does sound as though Robach, a longtime news anchor in America, is saying that she’s never stopped to think about how race plays a role in the dynamic between herself and her boyfriend.
Holmes went on to explain to Robach on mic that throughout his career, in boardrooms, in newsrooms that when you are going face to face with a colleague or a white woman and things get heated, I know that there’s only so much base I can put in my voice.”
“I have made conscious decisions not to even stand up when I am being confronted or taken on by a white woman who might be screaming at the top of her lungs and disrespectful to me,” he added. “But I know as soon as I make any move, it is going to be now seen as a threat.”
Ultimately, Robach said she hoped their conversation was “eye-opening” to listeners because “when we were recording this and going through this authentic moment... it never crossed my mind that there would be any racial element to this.”
