Eboni K. Williams knew exactly what she was getting into when she signed on to become Real Housewives of New York City’s first Black cast member. “I’m not new to this. I was often the only Black girl in the pageant,” Williams told V.F. during a series of phone calls at the end of April. A self-described Bravo superfan, Williams said she’s seen every episode of RHONY, the Housewives franchise’s crown jewel—but despite her familiarity with the series, she also isn’t taking the behavior of her castmates, Ramona Singer, Luann de Lesseps, Sonja Morgan, and Leah McSweeney, at face value. “I didn’t for one second think that’s who these women are,” she told me. “I know enough to know that people are so much more than what you see in that one medium, on that one platform. It’s really a fraction of what’s going on.”
From her very first episode, which airs on Bravo on May 4, it’s clear that Williams’s media savvy prepared her well for the potentially uncomfortable position of being fresh meat on a beloved series. She embodies an archetype that’s becoming more common across the Housewives franchise, as Bravo seeks to diversify its long-running series by hiring women like Williams, Haitian American actor and model Garcelle Beauvais—who recently joined the cast of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills—and Asian American anesthesiologist Dr. Tiffany Moon, who’s now a Real Housewife of Dallas.
Williams is more than used to being the only woman of color to occupy a given space. Born in the small town of Amite, Louisiana, she attended UNC Chapel Hill and Loyola University New Orleans College of Law before beginning her career as the only Black woman at a Charlotte law firm. Though it allowed her to pay off law school debt, Williams quickly found corporate law to be “very generic”—so she quite literally walked across the street, where another law office stood, and applied for the less glamorous, less well-paid position of public defender. “I wanted to do something that felt unique and that it was making a difference in everyday people’s lives,” she said.
Williams, a former pageant queen, remembers initially being dismissed as too “girly” for the public defense job. “I show up to the interview looking like I look,” she said— “my curls, my suit, my heels. And they were like, I don’t know if you’re really cut out for this.” She took the note, dressed down for her second interview, and got hired. “Don’t let this pretty-girl shit fool you,” she said. “I’m with the shit.”
Since her public defender days, Williams’s career has taken a few surprising turns. She pivoted from law to broadcast journalism, appearing Fox News as a guest contributor during the 2013 George Zimmerman trial. Williams was eventually asked to coanchor the talk show The Fox News Specialists in 2017. She was never worried about the implications of appearing on the conservative news network as a Black woman; joining Fox was the sort of sacrifice she believes is necessary to make a difference. “I was just so focused on the work,” she said, knowing that Fox was in desperate need of a contributor like her: “an educated, unapologetic, skilled, Black legal and political expert. The fact that I was so hyper-focused on those elements of it, I didn’t even give it a second thought. There is this price of disruption. And I’ve just never been afraid to pay it.”
Williams ultimately did pay the price at Fox, choosing to leave the network after alienating its viewers with an edition of her segment, Eboni’s Docket, in which she criticized Donald Trump for his response to the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. Since then Williams has found a home as a broadcast journalist at the Sean Combs–founded Revolt TV, hosting the program State of the Culture while appearing on RHONY. And while Williams has been vocal about her fraught experience at Fox, being a person of color in a potentially hostile environment also taught her a valuable lesson. When contentious topics arose on her first season of RHONY, for example, “I [didn’t] go into these conversations with an intention to change hearts and minds,” she said. “I abandoned that mission after Fox News.”
But even though Williams doesn’t feel obligated to enlighten the masses—and doesn’t seem to care what people think of her own hard-to-pin-down political views—she’s clear about where she stands on several hot-button issues. In her first scene on RHONY, Williams is wearing a Black Lives Matter mask and a sweatshirt dedicated to the Exonerated Five. The outfit was very intentional, said Williams. Her book, Pretty Powerful: Appearance, Substance, and Success, is “all about the intentionality of leveraging your aesthetic and how you show up appearance-wise in spaces to convey messaging. And so that’s exactly what you see in those scenes. Oh, we’re shooting in Central Park today with Leah McSweeney? I’m gonna put on a Central Park Five sweatshirt because that’s important.”
Her outspokenness about issues regarding “the liberation of my people,” Williams said, will reverberate throughout the season. Onscreen she’s funny and direct in her delivery, with a bit of a potty mouth—which she acknowledges may rub some of her castmates the wrong way. “On one of the episodes not too far into the season, [my cursing] leads to a pretty direct and nasty confrontation,” she said. “This notion of language and vulgarity ends up being a point of massive conflict and contention.”
Speaking of conflict: Williams also isn’t concerned with teaching critical race theory to a cast of mostly white-lady boomers. Even so, her cohort’s antics often force her to wear that hat; this season finds her educating the ladies on the history of Black Americans in Sag Harbor and side-eyeing Sonja Morgan after she goes out of her way to point out the black-and-white fish in her koi pond. “I wasn’t exhausted, but I could see how someone else in my position would be,” Williams said of her dual role as cast member and resident Black woman. “You have to remember, I have a degree in Black studies, right? So I’m not just, like, a Black woman who is showing up as her authentic self. Part of my authentic self is the kind of minutiae of the Black experience…My capacity to engage in the details and these conversations about Black life and experience is probably abnormally high.”
At the same time her castmates’ capacity to discuss issues surrounding race, Williams agreed, is “abnormally low”—especially for women who call a city as diverse as New York home. “I think some of my cast members are abnormally triggered around the mere mention of even the word Black,” Williams said. “And you’re going to see that in some episodes, the mentioning of the word Black. The mention of the word Black is a lightning rod, and that kind of tells you all you need to know about where we’re starting.”
Our conversation turned to her castmate Ramona Singer, the RHONY O.G. who won hearts early on with her energetic “turtle time” kookiness…and made headlines this summer for attending mask-less Hamptons events with the likes of Donald Trump Jr. The social media reaction to Williams’s casting was ecstatic, largely because viewers anticipated clashes between her and Singer: “‘Oh, yay. We’re so happy. A Black woman is finally on this show, so they can read Ramona to filth,’” Williams said, ruefully recalling the chatter. “But that’s also not in my job description. So I don’t really give a fuck about reading Ramona for filth.” Of course, given Singer’s narcissistic tendencies, Williams’s response is a read in itself.
Williams also brings a lot to the table that has nothing to do with race. She opens up about her romantic and past financial struggles from the get-go: “I told production I wanted to share this because it’s so easy, especially in this social media era that we live in—and especially on a platform like Housewives—to show the glamour and the access and the wealth. And I mean, as we’re starting to see, the cracks are showing,” Williams told me—a carefully worded apparent reference to the recent spate of legal issues that have befallen several Housewives. “I think it is so wholly intellectually and morally dishonest to not be forthcoming about how we got to the places that we’re currently at.”
Rest assured, though, that she and Singer do get into it. The season is generally chock-full of drama despite its smaller cast size—just five central women instead of the more typical six to eight. “Take their personalities and then whatever little bit you might know about mine. Honey, please,” Williams joked. “Five of us is like eight or nine in any other city.”
As for those other cities: Williams “absolutely loves” the ladies of Potomac, whom she described as paragons of “Black excellence,” and is friendly with the newest Real Housewives of Beverly Hills recruit, Crystal Kung Minkoff, the Asian American wife of Disney director Rob Minkoff—who’s ostensibly been brought in to play a role similar to that of Williams. “I just think as a rookie class, which is like myself, [Minkoff], Tiffany Moon, and some others, I think that there’s just that innate kind of bond there. And we’re women of color,” she said. While the prospect of shaking up a formula that’s worked for 12 seasons may prove daunting to some, Williams is more than up for the challenge. “There’s a part of me that is what I call a kind of a natural-born disruptor,” said Williams. “I just so full-heartedly believe in the power of disruption for good.”
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