Race
Relationships - September
15
Pop Quiz! I am going to ask you 5 questions. You give me
the answers. Ready?
1. What are the four faces on Mt. Rushmore?
2. Where is Sun City located and what major issue was it
involved with in the 1980's?
3. Who is Chiang Kai-Shek and how is he connected to
Taiwan?
4. Who is the current President of Puerto Rico?
5. What organization is Vincent K. McMahon the head of?
Each of the first four questions are connected to one of
the four cultures represented by tribes in this season's
Survivor. The last question was to see how much you knew
about World Wrestling Entertainment. Chances are that
the one that most of you guys got correct was the last
question.
Now many of you, I'm sure, knew who was on Mt. Rushmore.
If you are a Jeopardy fanatic, then you may have known
all of them, as Sun City and Chiang Kai-Shek are staples
(or should be staples) of recent cultural history.
I personally find it very funny that many advertisers
are going to pull their product from this series of
Survivor. Their reason? Oh no! It's all about races!
Someone may be offended! People, please. There's a
reason why I don't have an issue about this season of
Survivor. The reason? As a nation, we are all too
ignorant to really be racist.
When I went to the College of New Jersey, there were
many minority functions that I was fortunate enough to
have attended. A friend of mine, who also went to many
of these functions, never thought that people were
racist, and I agree with that sentiment. The problem is
as a whole, we don't get enough information about other
cultures to truly be racist.
You can certainly blame the news for it, as they have
their cultural snippets at the last five seconds of the
program, which by that point, we have already flipped
channels to make sure we don't miss a minute of
Jeopardy! or Entertainment Tonight. But it's too easy to
blame the media for that. To boil it down, we aren't a
learned country because we don't want to be. We
certainly have enough information on the internet if we
wanted to know about cultures, but we just don't. We
know more about Paris Hilton's new CD and the WWE than
we know about apartheid in South Africa, thanks to Sun
City. And that is a shame.
So let's discuss this and Survivor. Why are we so
worried about who is going to be offended? Why are we
spending so much time worrying how people will react
when they are bitching for 30 days on an island when we
have our own racial issues in the United States - racial
issues that are far and away more important than 20
people on an island - and racial issues that no one is
doing anything about.
We are all experts when it comes on blaming someone for
a situation. Yet, most of us are amateurs when it comes
to dealing with it. I was going to give you the answers
to all of the questions, but I decided that I would let
you find the answers for yourself. Why? Because spending
the energy to get the answers would be more than what
most people spend on thinking about how to deal with
race relations - an issue, that if we just spent some
time to get to know our fellow man, would be just as
insignificant historically as 20 people vying for
one million dollars.
E-mail Gordon Pepper about your thoughts on this at
gordon@gameshownewsnet.com.
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