Amazing Races

Call me a sucker for a gimmick. I haven't watched Survivor since, I think, season two, but I tuned in last night for the premiere of season 13, the one where they've divided the teams by race.

My first thought when I saw the commercial was one many other people probably shared: "Are they really doing that?" I'll hand it to CBS -- it was a pretty ballsy move. We don't even like to talk about race in this country, never mind create situations where four different races would openly compete.

Survivor, however, calls them "ethnicities" rather than "races," and in a weird way that makes the whole thing more palatable, doesn't it? To me, ethnicity suggests ancestry, where race is all about DNA. And race is almost irrelevant since, as far as I know, the DNA of a white person is all but indistinguishable from a black person or an Asian person or a Latin American.

And the gimmick turned out to feel mostly irrelevant too. Sure, there will probably be a tendency to want to read symbolism into which team wins and which loses, but with only five representative people per team it would be hard to take any of that seriously. What struck me the most was how American all these people are. Being American somehow supersedes color. So it's probably a lot less scandalous than CBS had hoped. They're just dopes on an island, after all, no matter what color they are.

They're going to have to show more of Ozzy shimmying up palm trees if they're going to keep me watching, because the race thing is old news already. I'm happy to say: Who cares?