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December 9, 2006
the back-pack
In a season where the producers of Survivor crassly commercialized racial tensions, a far more naturalistic experiment quietly occurred on the Amazing Race. The show quickly—and uncomfortably, for me anyway—divided into haves and have nots. You had your well-manicured, unlikable white teams—the indistinguishably pretty, heroin-addict male models; the intolerably smug, stupid couple complaining about the rest of the world smelling funny and not speaking English; and the blond, tank-topped Miss America contestants targeting man after man to help them get a leg up, and giggling at their own cleverness every time they called black contestants "the sistas."
And then you had the have nots—the karma-believing Cho brothers, the simple country folk from a Kentucky trailer park, and the black single mothers from Alabama. These three teams often came in last, so they allied and called themselves the "Six Pack." Meanwhile, the white teams sneered that the "Back Pack" was more like it.
And then we watched as something unprecedented happened: the alliance held. The Six-Packers helped one another avoid elimination, a first on the show. They even waited for one another mid-race in order to offer assistance. And then we watched as the snotty white teams picked them off one by one anyway, all the while attributing their success to merit and to the Pack's obvious lack of it. "They're bottom feeders," one utterly unremarkable white guy snorted.
Sorry, Survivor, it's the Amazing Race that got race right.
posted by john at 7:35 AM • permalink