Katurah’s Switch to the Reba Alliance:
“If there’s something that I missed [in the episodes], honestly, probably the intentionality that I used when I flipped over to Reba. It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing. I’m talking about at the 12-12 split and me deciding to vote out Kaleb. That was me leading up to 12, no, 14 days of having worked with Belo people and feeling constantly excluded and really feeling like I kept trying to make it work and being like, oh, I’m hitting a wall. I’m trying to connect, hitting a wall, and then being like, all right, well, I’m on a new tribe. Let’s try it again. It is what it is. Tribe swap wasn’t ideal for me, but hey, put it to the side and try again. And then it didn’t work again.
“Then at the merge being like, OK, we’re at the merge. We need the numbers, put it to the side, try again. And then Bruce was able to be the leadership voice that I was viewing that he had always been, and people listened. And our core number, Kaleb, was now on the chopping block because Belo was so giving into what Bruce said. I was like, I’ve tried three times with Belo, and it doesn’t work. So then when I approached Reba, it wasn’t me being like, oh my God, I’m emotional. It was like, look, let’s map this out. I literally was like, I will work with y’all. I will make sure I vote with Belo every time. They will not know that I’m working with you guys, and then we’ll get out all the Belos.
“I was thinking — and this is the part I didn’t share with Reba — once we get out the Belos, since I know there’s no way that they’re going to be able to strategically value or include me or give me key information, at some point Reba’s going to turn on itself and then I’ll be there standing and be like, yeah, I’m the one to help you vote out people. I just feel like that maybe didn’t get shown as much, and it might look like I was just spur of the moment, let me flip. But it was very deliberate and it was after calculating for 14 days.”
Her Season-Long Strategy:
“I came into the game saying, it’s not a coincidence that we have 44 seasons and only two Black girls have ever won. I knew my odds of winning were astronomically lower than probably any other dynamic. It just hasn’t happened. I was like, you’re not going to win being big and flashy. I could have went in and said, ‘I’m a big New York City lawyer and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah,’ and ‘look how great I can be and look how much I can lead and move.’ But I was like, they’re going to be like, ‘and cut’ immediately. And they were like, ‘and cut’ even without knowing any of that!
“So my goal was to kind of put my dignity to the side and accept that you want people to view you as this lower, non-threatening thing that they can just have floating alone. But then I don’t think I realized how painful that ended up being. It was like I wanted y’all to think I was disposable and invisible, but not this damn disposable and invisible. I felt very excluded and very invisible and not seen as valuable for so long in those first 14 days … It felt better when I executed blindsides against them. That was the best part. I want to be a sweet, nice, good human being, but I was like revenge!”
This story originally appeared on TV Insider
