The next season of Survivor will be a social experiment involving race and ethnicity. The 4 starting tribes will be segregated racially/ethnically: whites vs. blacks vs. Asians vs. Hispanics. They claim this is a response to complaints that the show isn’t ethnically diverse enough, which in turn they blame on low numbers of minority applicants. [1]
Now, there’s something that Variety reported that most other news outlets (like Reuters, where so many places get their news) aren’t including. [2] Show runners Mark Burnett and Jeff Probst believe that, judging from past seasons, the tribes won’t stay together for very long. The most successful contestants will integrate with other races.
They also believe that the nature of the situation will cause contestants to ignore race. I mean, survival is at stake, right? Resources are scarce. You don’t know who you can trust. In some situations, you have to get by on your wits. In many others, might makes right. It’s an unfamilar environment, and a lot times, you’re just plain scared. All the while, the people in charge refuse to interfere unless someone needs medical attention, or they have some sadistic game they want to play.
If only there was some place, some sort of social institution that had similar conditions, which might give us some clue as to how this might turn out. But clearly none exists. Except, maybe… Nawww, that’d be an unfair comparison. Right? I mean…
Prison?
Of course! Now there’s a textbook example of how adversity destroys race lines! Walk into any prison today, and you’ll see race isn’t an issue. It’s a fucking rainbow coalition in there! Everyone working together to overcome adversity, completely color blind. It’s friggin’ inspirational, is what it is.
But some people aren’t so happy about this. The Hispanics seem to be the most outspoken against it. [3] Those upset seem to fall into two camps. The first is concerned that the burden of representing an ethnicity is unfairly placed on the 5 Hispanic contestants. Ok, that’s reasonable, the producers could easily game the system to make an ethnicity look good or bad, by casting more or less capable contestants. [4] Perhaps they’re concerned Mark Burnett took a pickup truck down to Home Depot and said (in Spanish), “The first 5 to hop in the back get $20 an hour!” Done and done.
The second camp is pissed that the bookies have set the odds at 3:1 against them. [gambling911.com [5]] My guess is that the bookies did some research and found out Burnett did not do casting at Home Depot, ’cause that tribe would kick everyone’s ass. And they’d all stick together, mainly due to the language barrier.
Still others have pointed out that, all of a sudden, the word “tribe” is starting to sound racially insensitive. This might explain why there’s no American Indian tribe: too obvious.
Well, I’m certainly curious as to how this will turn out. [6] To be honest, I think a really interesting experiment would be to start the teams out desegregated. Say, 5 teams of 5 (add in Middle Easterners), where each team has one person of each ethnicity. When the new tribes were formed, would they remain desegregated? I posit this: the producers were too chicken to find out.
[1] I’m not sure if they complainers are saying the Survivor casts’ ethnic makeup isn’t representative of society at large, or they just don’t know what “minority” means. For better or worse, the US is about 80% white, so for a cast of 20 you’d expect 16 whites and 4 non-whites. I’m not being racist, just crazy awesome at math.
[2] Which is why you should get all your news from The Crack Team.
[3] Unfortunately, I only have the media as a source.
[4] And I can almost guarantee that’s the first thing certain members of the losing race/ethnicity will claim.
[5] Motto: “Help, I can’t stop gambling!”
[6] Almost enough to finally watch an episode of Survivor.
Hey Archangel, welcome back to “Survivor”
I have dutifully watched every single season of the show. Renegade watched most seasons but even *he* gave up after the last couple of non-remarkable show seasons.
As a long-term watcher, I can predict that there is nothing remarkable about the ethnicity grouping. You are correct: as soon as one tribe is down in significant numbers, they will all be recombined into some other arrangement. What we observe is that the newcomers are always ostracized, not because of their ethnicity but because they are a newcomer –an unknown element that could mess up your own game plans. If a particular group loses 2 challenges in near-succession, I expect that racial group to be eliminated from the later part of the game.
However, if the contests are arranged (read:rigged) to allow proportionate attrition from all of the tribes, then we should see some bonding between same group (eg: ethnically-similar) contestans. It’s just the way that the game has always been played.
Finally, I totally disagree with your description of prison life. I have not served time but I do know that there are groups inside that take care of their own: the Aryan nation, for instance. There are similar groups for African-Americans and Latinos. I don’t hear much of a cross-over, unless it’s in the general prison population that does not join a protection group.
Great comparison you made to the prison system.
I’ve watched enough “Inside the Cell” documentaries on TV to know that prison beat high schools when it comes to racial cliques.
I also want to point out (living as a minority, representin’ fo’ Lakewood NJ, yo!) that the census reports the “pure?” white population closer to 67 percent. The 80% you have read about is including some hispanics.
Oops. Soon after I posted, I read Bladerunner’s response which snuck in ahead of mine.
I’m confused now.
I took ArchAngel’s prison-post as being sarcasm… is this not the case?
Clear this up for us!
Uh, yeah, I *thought* I was being completely over-the-top sarcastic. The Internet ruins everything. For the record, I do not believe it’s an interracial love-fest inside prisons. Hmm, on second thought…
As for race, I was taught by the fine NJ public school system that, biologically, there are only 3 races: caucasoid, mongoloid, and negroid. On Wikipedia, the discussion is much longer, complex, and kinda boring. So I like to use the safer word ethnicity, which does have some cultural connotation, but I think the word race does as well these days.
As for racial “purity”, I don’t think it makes a difference. Biologically, Hispanics are “caucasoid” – not a big enough genetic difference. You’ve got blondes in Spain, esp. in the northern region. You’ve got European immigrants to Puerto Rico: after a couple generations, are they now Hispanic? It’s all far too poorly defined. For my college, you needed 3 minority (Black or Hispanic) grandparents to count as a minority. Not knowing this, I put myself down as Hispanic and got a scholarship. In hindsight I should’ve at least learned Spanish before doing that. I could tell the first thing people thought was, “Who’s the white kid?” Don’t get me wrong, everyone was extremely friendly and accepting (except for one guest speaker who kept giving me the stink-eye), but *I* felt out place. Since then, I’ve listed myself as White on those census forms, but I still think it’s all a lot of hooey. I think we need to look more to poverty lines than race lines.
Sorry, I read your review in an entirely serious manner. We need a “sarcasm” emoticon in the blog!! Yes, the racial distinctions that our society makes are a bunch of garbage. To the non-Terran looking down, our DNA is identical and marks us as one species, not as a grouping of similar subspecies. And yet we have enough difference factors built in that make Hispanics like myself more likely to get diabetes or high blood pressure. Go figure.
BTW, don’t feel bad, Archangel. I’ve met plenty of white people with the surname “Rodriguez” or such that are applying for minority bank loans to start small businesses. The whole thing is a joke, if you ask me. We shouldn”t have racial segregation or discrimination in this country; it should be class segregation and discrimination. We should start classifying people not by the color of their skin, but by the size of the bulge in their wallets. By that measure, that a**hole that gave you the stink eye classifies as an idiot who should have known better. You should have given him/her a piece of your mind that day.