Survivor 13: Spics vs. Chinks???

[Ghoulish Delight]

Ummm, so Mark Burnett has unveiled that the next survivor season wil start with 4 tribes...divided along racial lines ("White" "African-American" "Asian-American" "Hispanic"). Wow. Just...wow.

I think this commentary does a good job of pointing out the pitfalls of this decission.

Start with the fact that it smells like an attempt to "represent" everyone, and expecting five people to be representative of millions or billions is begging for trouble. Consider what happens if, for reasons unrelated to race, four of the first five people to leave are Asian? What if the final four are all black? Or all white? What do those headlines look like?

But does "ethnic pride" really mean the same thing to all people, such that we assume a contestant whose family is Korean automatically feels some special pride on behalf of someone whose family is Japanese? That is not to even consider the enormously sticky issue of whether someone whose great-grandparents are Russian is supposed to have shared "ethnic pride" with someone whose great-grandparents are Irish. It's a big jump to go from understanding that ethnic pride exists to believing it allows everyone to be divided into four teams.

Well, at the very least, Burnett has once again succeeded in creating buzz and print for Survivor. Whether he's created entertainment or not remains to be seen.