50% People of Color- The New Survivor Rule of Casting

Supposedly, at least the 41^st season of Survivor and maybe the 42^nd season are already cast. But will that affect the new potential casting change? That, I don’t yet know. There is this new rule that is being implemented for future Survivor seasons. That rule says that any new cast of Survivor has to have 50% people of color. This has to be in response to some of the current racial unrest in this country.

One would have to think: is this a good idea? You’d think that it should be with no issues. But then there is the fact that Survivor has already tried doing more diverse casts in the past. This is despite the fact that around 80% of the applicants to this show are (or used to be) white. While they could ignore any applications to recruit new players instead, this is probably a bad idea. But I’ll explain more of why I don’t like recruits of new players in another post, probably the next one.

You see, in Survivor: Cook Islands, the casts were split into four tribes at the beginning and whatever race you were born into was the tribe you started on. Since this was considered segregation (despite the fact that no camp site was better or worse than the others, which typically happens with segregation), the show was decried as racist. They had a cast with only 25% white people, but this was too much of any issue since they couldn’t put the casts together originally. What was dumb about the twist was how they got rid of it early into the game.

Despite the controversy it caused, some of the players like the twist. It seems to some that this was going to be used again in the very next season. But a last minute twist left the cast with an odd number of players and I can’t even tell how this could have worked with four starting tribes. Plus, this season had only one applicant on the show while the rest were all recruited.

Still, one has to wonder if forcing half of the cast to be something other than Caucasian is a good idea. Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m okay with the idea. I’m just wondering if they are doing too much pandering to a side of supposed racial justice by simply hoping that making half of the cast not white each season is a good way of doing this or not. There’s another problem that needs to be addressed as well that I don’t think that casting alone can fix.

The edit of people would need to be fixed. Black men on this show are often portrayed as lazy. The black women are typically shown fighting with others or otherwise having attitude. The women of Asian descent typically are mistreated or otherwise hated by their tribe. While that might be more due to the way tribes are set or how friction takes place among contestants and not the edit, as long as we see the negative edits of these players, casting alone won’t fix the mess.

Honestly, I think that once we see more Survivor with these more racially integrated casts, we’ll see if this idea works well or not. I can only hope this is a good thing and not just some way of appeasing the so called social justice warriors (SJWs) who are not actually good people like you’d think they should be. Is intentionally trying to put in more minorities a good thing? I can only hope so. For now, this is Adam Decker, signing off.