Pretending to Be “Postracial”: The Spectacularization of Race in Reality TV’s Survivor

Abstract

While race is usually an implicit discourse in reality television, making it an explicit discourse seems to have little effect on challenging the prevailing representations of race in prime-time television. This research demonstrates how Survivor ’s “race wars” season attempted to reinforce a “postracial” narrative that race no longer matters in contemporary U.S. society while simultaneously perpetuating the familiar representations that reproduce racial ideology. Using data derived from a systematic content analysis, the author argues that Survivor spectacularized race by (1) using racial logic to explain the success and failure of teams as well as the failure of individuals to survive within their teams, (2) essentializing people of color’s racial identity as biologically and culturally bound while simultaneously making whiteness invisible and normal, and (3) promoting color-blind and postracial assertions that contradicted the clear salience of race in shaping contestants’ “survival.” The author considers what this explicit racialization of the program reveals about the potential for—and pitfalls of—addressing race in reality television.