Life as a checked-box

It’s okay to be racist; it’s just “ethnic pride.” According to CBS that is. I guess I was asleep and missed the pop culture cues on that one. This fall, the reality show that defined a genre has decided to split 20 contestants up into four ethnic groups: “African-American,” “Asian-American,” “Hispanic,” and “white.” The terminology makes me think I woke up in a bad parallel 1982. I suppose the show’s producers forcibly removed the “Native American” team before filming began while they were too busy pretending there are no “Middle Eastern-Americans” in the USA. Listening to NPR’s ”Day to Day” this morning, I learned that the producers of CBS’ Survivor: Cook Islands rationalized their “race-baiting”, attention-grabbing “social experiment” on the basis of just having interviewed people with a lot of “ethnic pride.” Since half of them admit to be actors, that sounds a little fishy to me. With ethnic- or religious-based civil wars raging in large swaths of the world, it seemed like a good time to divide people up over “ethnic pride.”

Really, it’s okay that “corporate America” wants to convince us that racism is “so last year” that it’s “all good” for people to identify with labels and supposedly root for a team based purely on their sharing the same ethnic background. Of course, all of us multiracial/multicultural, Native-American, and/or Middle-Eastern-American people will just have to watch other shows this season. But I’m not sure what since the new racial divide haunts me wherever I go. Last Sunday’s Comedy Central Roast of William Shatner contained a plethora of racist and homophobic humor (like George Takei’s difficulty saying “glory hole” because of his Asian accent, which last I heard had the perfected pronunciation of a Shakespearean actor, but I guess I slept through that too). Here’s a novel idea. Maybe I should just turn off my television because by now I’ve learned I’m not really part of the target audience for anything anyways.

Of course, listening to the news I realize that this pop cultural joke is not relegated to poorly conceived television shows. Apparently the Bush administration believes that certain regulations are no longer necessary. Even worse, they keep people out of schools “because of their [white] race.” As Survivor proves, we have clearly solved the difficulties around race in this country.