Thursday, August 24, 2006

Surviving Racism

                    

Survivor [a show I really never watched] is going old school with it's 13th season. 

There are four teams.  Oooooo.  Each team has 5 people.  Oooooo.  The teams?

White team.
Black team.
Hispanic team.
Asian team.

What??  This new setup brings in a bunch of questions.....and a bunch of ratings.  I mean, why else would anyone talk about Survivor unless they are getting their betting pools together? 

The setup invites a ton of stereotypes....and I pray to god that they thought long and hard about who comprises these teams.  You don't want something happen....and "middle white America" say "see, I told you they all are like that."  The producers claimed the contestants had "ethnic pride".....which is foolish.  Ethnic pride??  ASIAN covers a slew of countries.  And last time I checked, sticking a Japanese person, a Chinese person, a Vietnamese person, a Thai person and a Korean person on the same team and there isn't much that binds them.  And "Asian", to me, means Pakastan, Russia, Ukraine, India and Mongolia.....since they are also ASIAN countries.

Same with the Hispanic team [or "Mexican team"....as one of my unenlightened co-workers said].  Are these Americans of Latino decent???  Or people who are actually from Latin America.  And are Spaniards included??  How about the white team?  A white person from New England is different than a white person from the South.....or a white person from California.  And black?  Is that African Americans, Africans, Cubans, what??

And why did they stop there???  Why not an Arabic team??  Where are they??  How about Indian people.  I mean, they only comprise 1/6 of the world's population.  Both races are very prominant in American culture.  And honestly, I can see how this shakes out.  Where I work, there are whites, blacks, Hispanics and "Asians".  Will we sit down for our break and secretly be rooting for our races to suceed???  Most likely, yes. 

Of course, the most interesting part will be when those teams merge together as one.  Will you see the systematic "voting off" of the other races as alliances are built among the "our kinds".  It just is dumb to do something like this for the sake of ratings. 

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I don't know what to think about this.......

I mean, If they put a bunch of sissy white collar white dudes from New York on a team and expect them to survive, than I am going to be pis# off.
As Hank Jr. said, "a country boy will survive", and that does not mean just white people. There are plenty of other races that can survive in the wilderness. Come on, do you really think somebody that grew-up shopping at Create and Barrel to know how to skin an animal, hunt, fish.........No

This should have less to do with ethnicity, and more to do with what type of environment you have lived in all your life.....who cares about what color they are.