Friday, September 01, 2006

New Season of Survivor reads like Chappelle's Show episode gone wrong


Yesterday, I was checking my email on Yahoo when I saw a headline that read, New Survivor Divides Groups by Race. Like any other person in the world, I wanted to find out more, so I clicked on the story link. At first I thought that the headline was just a play on words, but as I read more, I figured out that it was a machination devised by the show producers in order to boost ratings and exploit the 'color line.' Apparently on the upcoming season of Survivor, the contestants will be divided into 4 teams, segregated according to 'race.' The four 'races' represented are white, African American, Latino and Asian. It would be easy for me to excoriate CBS for their decision to sanction the show production, but in retrospect, would we expect anything else from this media conglomerate?
As I began to skim the rest of the story, it began to read more like a Chappelle's Show skit gone terribly wrong. You know, like The Racial Draft, or The Mad Real World. These skits are considered classics by purveyors of sketch comedies and Chappelle's Show. Why? Because they were outlandish parodies based on deep-seated racial stereotypes and bigotry. The aforementioned sketches contained interpolations of the tacit thoughts of members of variegated racial groups, but sprinkled with a dash of levity.
In the United Stated, wars and skirmishes alike have been fought over the issue of race. So in my opinion, it is sickening to see this issue exploited for monetary gain. Martin Luther King longed to see a blessed community, where a person's race would not be exploited, but the producers of this show are hell bent on setting race relations back another 100 years. Producers have responded by saying that this twist is just another layer added to Survivor's social experiment premise.
Like The Bell Curve, which posits that black are intellectually inferior to whites (and all other races for that matter), the new season of Survivor, I suspect, will yield findings that will be deleterious to the psyches of African American youth and adults. I am tired of seeing television programming being dictated by the clandestine activities of avaricious executives who care more about ratings than people and seem to push substance to the way side. Producers of this show do not realize that they are interfering with the racial stability (as preposterous as it sounds) of the United States. Let's pray that I'm exaggerating!

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home