The latest Survivor, as I'm sure you've heard, is splitting tribes along four ethnic lines: white, black, Asian and Hispanic. For the last week, the media's been filled with producer Mark Burnett's desperate flame-fanning. It's the most controversial Survivor yet! we're told. We've always been criticized for not being diverse, so how do you like our solution?
Pass.
Yeah, it's tasteless and probably socially harmful, but that's not what bothers me. Commercial exploitation of race and racism—that bothers me. Sensationalize something else for ratings, please. Not since record labels introduced us to commercialized pedophilia in the late 90s has something so cynical been foisted upon us in the name of entertainment. I didn't watch teenage Britney rub her crotch on a camera lens then, and I ain't watching the Survivors' inevitable, staged Month Two epiphany about "how people are just people" now.