Survivor: The Amazing Races
II. Counterpoint: Survivor: Soylent Green
III. Final Word: Off the Island
Point: Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em
What kind of a world do we live in? Do we live in a world free of racism? Do we live in a world where everyone is treated equally under the law? Do we live in a world where people are protected from disaster, no matter what their socioeconomic background? Are we free of prejudice? Or is that only what we like to tell ourselves?
One of the many lessons of Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke is that, though it has the power, America may not have the will required to do what is necessary for its poorest communities. Why not? What the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina proved more than anything is that there is still a latent disregard for black Americans. They are still the Other. They are still invisible, and white America still holds them at arms length. The levee broke, but the “color line” was exposed to be nothing short of a color wall. We are so entrenched in our segregationist ways that we cannot even bear the thought of living with our black population even if it means holding them at gunpoint in a horrific nightmare world like the one that became of the Superdome.
To say that we have conquered racism is to blatantly and irresponsibly ignore the way we live now.
Which brings me to this season of Survivor. Producer Mark Burnett, criticized for his rampant tokenism in seasons past, has decided to answer concerns over the racial makeup of his show by putting more ethnic minorities on that ever before. Cause for celebration? Hardly. Burnett and company has seen fit to separate the contestants along racial lines to ... what? Conduct a social experiment? To prove what?
The whole affair reminds me of a quote from one of our dear founding fathers, the esteemed Thomas Jefferson, who, along with assuring us that “all men are created equal,” also went on later to write that nobody wished more than him to “...see proofs that nature has given to our black brethren talents equal to those of the other colors of men, and that the appearance of a lack of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence in Africa and America.”
Well, all I can say is: too bad Jefferson didn’t get to watch the thirteenth season of Survivor, where five people from each minority the producers chose to feature in this fiasco were left to hold the bag (or “represent,” as the black contestants put it in the first episode) and carry the torch for their respective races.
This is, of course, absurd. I am with the contestant who, when put on the spot and asked how he felt about being an example of his race, laughed at Jeff Probst, the show’s host, and shook his head in bewilderment at the foolishness of anyone taking the events of a reality show as scientific proof of anything at all.
Because that is the truth of the matter. The white team could conquer, and it would mean nothing. The black team could not be able to swim, and it wouldn’t prove anything. Any team could do anything and it would prove nothing about them other than that they were individuals who played the game one way and had one outcome occur to them.
As a scientific experiment, it is sorely lacking. Anyone moderately schooled in statistics can tell you that the sample size is nowhere near large enough to provide anything approaching statistically significant findings of any sort, let alone draw conclusions about causations or correlations. There is also no way that the variables--whatever they may be--could ever be controlled. Probst and company realized this right away, of course, and tried to compensate at the end of the first episode by throwing some flint to the losing team -- just to keep the playing field fair, which, of course, it won’t be and can’t be for everyone throughout the game. That’s the nature of Survivor.
But I am not decrying CBS for deciding to run the program. I am not boycotting it, nor am I going to even go so far as to say it is a bad thing for our country to have this air. The reason gets back to my view of the kind of world we live in and what we love to believe about it and ourselves.
Speaking as part of the white problem, I could best classify myself as a liberal. As a liberal, I like to tell myself just what Jefferson might have written had he gone to a more modern school: that all people ARE created equal. More than that, I like to tell myself that this is what I believe, because it is what I feel I *should* believe, being a good liberal.
In fact, I would argue that this is in line with the current program. We’re supposed to see everyone as capable of the same stuff, yet we constantly see evidence that people who would otherwise proclaim not to have racial prejudice clearly do. That’s the way this game is played: we don’t say that we don’t want to live in a community that is fully integrated, but when it comes right down to it, if we have more than one black neighbor, we white people start packing our bags and putting our houses up for sale.
Racism is still very real in this country, whether we want it to be or not. What this season of Survivor does is effectively smoke out the racists who hide behind what they’ve been fed as the right way to behave. It gets at the heart of the problem. If you believe
- That you NEED Jeffersonian “proofs” of the equivalency of the races, or
- That this show is going to show you evidence, one way or the other, or
- That there ARE differences, and this show will bear them out
I am going to predict what will happen with this show: it will cause many people who harbor latent racism to give voice to that racism in talking about the show. These people will then be out in the open, and it is at that point that those socially-minded souls among us can confront the racists with their prejudice. We say we like movies like the Oscar-winning Crash because they expose the ways in which the world is still racist. Well? Is this not the same challenge, put before its audience in a way that actually baits them to reveal what most minorities already knew?
Not that I believe exposing racism in the viewers of this show was what the producers exactly intended, but I think that is what this season of Survivor will accomplish.
But why should we bother, you might ask? Why not let sleeping dogs lie? Doesn’t it just reinforce racism to bring it out like this and name it?
To put it plainly: it will do us no good to ignore what is already there. It will do us no good to continue to ignore a problem that cost us so many lives last year in the morally unconscionable waste that was the Katrina aftermath. But in the desire for elusive “proofs,” Jefferson echoes what is still reverberating through this country: the suspicion, even on the part of the white Americans that know they should know better, that really, the races ARE different, aren’t they?
It is that exact mentality that leaves black people waiting for a cab, or for a bus to take them out of a disaster zone, or for a government that cares enough to spend enough to secure the lives of those in its underclass, or for a shift in the will of the people that back the government so that those elected will care and do things that matter for those who need it.
This country is capable of anything so long as it has the will to get it done. The question is: where is that will, and why doesn’t white America have it?
Granted, a reality show can’t change the world, but at least it can smoke some of the rats out of their holes. Maybe through this misguided effort, a small little bit of good can be done.
Anyway, here’s hoping.
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Counterpoint: Survivor: Soylent Green
Two score and three years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Capitol and told everybody who would listen that “the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.” He analogized the African-American experience to “liv[ing] on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.”
The good doctor was a wise and courageous man, but he’s got nothing on Mark Burnett and the team of succubae that have brought us the current season of Survivor. It takes a special kind of depravity to use the concept of crippling segregation on a lonely island of poverty as a catalyst for profit and ratings. Many beasts will on occasion eat their own filth, but Burnett has collected an amalgam of the most putrid backwash of hatred and ignorance that America has to offer, repackaged it, and is selling it back to her as “socially conscientious” television. Apparently it doesn’t matter to some that “it’s …. People!”
Kris, in his indefatigable desire to justify being nice to Texans, suggests that this season of Survivor will “smoke out the racists.” Kris imagines some kind of white bred utopia where people with significant prejudices and racial issues are forced to confront those feelings in an open and honest way. He says these things as if both the individual and societal forces in favor of continued racial oppression weren’t already and everywhere very obvious to the dedicated observer. “Give voice to that racism in talking about the show.”? As if watching the show at all weren’t already a pretty good indication.
A cursory glance at any news cycle reveals that the racists are pretty well out in the open. They are not in hiding anymore, they are winning. The reason why you don’t see many Klansmen running around these days is because they no longer need to hide behind a child’s Halloween costume.
This show will expose nothing that minorities aren’t already aware of. You don’t need to tell a Puerto Rican what some white Republican in Nebraska thinks of her. She already knows. She’s not ignoring it. The only people who ignore racism are other white people. And that of course is what Kris is really talking about. Kris believes that there is a certain segment of white America that needs to learn something so maybe it’s okay to humiliate a few blacks and Latinos and Asians to help some ass crack redneck in South Carolina learn something. He’s telling us it is okay to conduct a so-called “social experiment” that is nothing less than insulting to all races if it can help just one white person.
Minorities have been playing this role at least since the beginning of integration. White liberals (the good white folks as it were) always want to remind us what we can “learn” form each other. It’s like brown people have to justify their equal access to everything by what the white man can get out of it. America needs to recognize that brown people do not exist to teach white people how to be decent.
Dr. King said, “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Self-Evident. The creed does not say “We hold these truths to be a reasonable assessment based on the preponderance of the evidence available to us at this time, that all men more likely than not are created within at least a standard deviation of equality, however so defined.” The whole point of a self-evident truth is that it does not need proof. It is obvious on its face. There is no reasonable argument to the contrary. The mere suggestion that somehow a game show, a terrible game show making a last grasp for ratings, could “prove” or help anything is honestly a thought that only a deranged white person could have.
The only thing that Survivor will prove is that we will allow anybody to exploit anything to make a buck. Unfortunately that is a self-evident truth that the nation has no problem living up to.
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Final Word: Off the Island
If nothing else, you have to admit: The metaphors are getting interestingly twisted here. Voting people off the island in Survivor means eliminating their chance to win the prize of a million dollars. Voting people off Dr. King’s island actually means integrating them with the larger population. While losing a million dollars might seem a bad thing, perhaps losing it and going home is the better prize: it is an escape from the exploitative game show and a chance to reintegrate with your home.
Except more likely than not, wherever these people came from is not all that racially integrated. The collection of twenty contestants on the island in this season of Survivor represents an unheard of percentage of ethnic minorities compared to the percentage of “white” contestants (which is in quotes because “white” is often a false construct that really obscures more diverse ancestry than many white people may be comfortable admitting). While the show’s producers have cast the show as a competition between the races, they nevertheless have chosen to show more minorities on screen during this season than any other season that CBS has aired. Where else in this country will you find a community that is only twenty-five percent white? Pitted against each other though the races may be, the island here represents a truly bizzaro version of Dr. King’s island of segregation; it seems on the one hand to be exactly that in that it is a separation of the races from each other and a further separation of the contestants from their homeland, while at the same time functioning as the greatest example of an integrated cast (all of whom get to experience the feeling of being in an alien environment) currently airing on network television.
I am inclined to believe that this confused little experiment is really then mostly benign. Any person watching and looking to make conclusions will have been doing the same thing during all the previous seasons, when the producers sent forth only one or two token minority contestants to take a shot at the million dollar prize. Racist people may now continue looking for Jeffersonian “proofs” of the racial prejudices that they harbor, but they may be thwarted in those efforts by the simple fact that this season there are just so many minority contestants. As long as team members on each racially-divided tribe don’t all behave alike (and so far, they most assuredly have not), any effort to generalize and make blanket statements will run into more trouble than if there was only one lone person, left to stand and represent his or her entire race.
The one thing racists love more than anything is to completely ignore people of other races. But now the playing field has been leveled (sort of), and at least four of the races that make up our country have been given equal opportunity to get out there and be exploited by network TV.
So ... yay?