Merry fascism! When the Supreme Court is riding through town playing Dirty Harry, what can anyone do? What eases American pain? I find succor in back-of-the-napkin stuff and wound-cleansing ice baths. This brings us to Survivor: Fiji, aka Season 14, which aired in early 2007 and contains the most unvarnished racism I’ve seen in, I don’t know, a week.
The final three players are all Black: Earl, Cassandra, and Dreamz. (If you are obsessively watching every season, as we are doing against medical advice, you need to know there are spoilers here.) To whiff the stink of that final tribal council, try this clip of Lisi’s remarks to Earl, Cassandra, and Dreamz. She opens, I shit you not, by saying, “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.” A white woman addresses three Black people this way. It is “liars” that she catches by the toe, but only because she couldn’t get away with her true song. According to the Survivor Wiki, Survivor: Fiji was “the first season in which the number of African-American, Asian-American, and Hispanic-American contestants outnumbered the amount of Caucasian contestants.”
The effect of that statistical fact, combined with the specter of an all-Black final three, is profound. The vitriol is not ultimately surprising but it comes as a shock in light of the show’s relentless foreshadowing. (There is rarely an event on Survivor that is not explained three seconds ahead of time by a music cue.) By the end of the show, the game play is calm and satisfying, a small raft of unpleasant people having been voted off. The legendary Yau-Man does not make it to the end, which is good news for our final three. (A true and gentle king, Yau-Man would have rightly swept the vote.) The unsuspecting viewer almost looks forward to the final tribal council. No such luck.
The collective tenor of the jury’s attitude is: How dare you? A 2023 translation of their mood would be: How can three Black people possibly deserve this? This isn’t fair. One juror, Stacy, asks Earl and Dreamz what makes them different. The subtext, the quiet part, whatever you want to call it, was loud as hell in 2006. You’re just versions of the same person, right? An otherwise friendly player named Alex, a lawyer lol, lays into Cassandra with a hostility that can only be described as carceral. Look up all the clips if you want to lose your mind.
The day after we finished Survivor: Fiji, Heidi sent me this two-hour roundtable of Black Survivor players, convened in June of 2020 by Sean Rector of Survivor: Marquesas (2002) and Rob Cesternino. (A vastly unappealing player on Survivor, Cesternino has a long-running podcast about reality shows and seems to have elevated himself.)
The depressing material is abundant: Earl and his two runners-up stood up during that final tribal to protest their treatment but their speech was edited out. Earl, after winning Survivor: Fiji, was not invited to any finale shows, most of which are filmed near his home in LA. It’s over two hours, but worth it: the behind-the-scenes intel is rich. The pre-determined nature of the casting and editing and story-boarding even included one player being asked, long before taping, if she would be upset by being portrayed as an “angry black woman.” And so on.
What all this underlines is how ideological state apparatuses are always cranking away. The visceral sense of imbalance that people, including Supreme Court justices, feel in the face of Black success is woven like a bright silver thread into the shit-stained narrative of Survivor: Fiji’s final tribal council. A manipulated reality, sold as entertainment, does the heavy lifting of feverishly suggesting that Man, these numbers man, they just don’t add up. They can’t get the same stuff we get, no way. Seen through their poisoned light, affirmative action does not feel like a correction from -2 to zero on the ethical scale but like an increase of deep injury, a drop from -10 to -100. Ted’s story (in that Zoom roundtable) of what Clay said about him sums it all up but I am not going to type that out. You’ll have to watch that shit stain for yourself.
The upside is that the recently aired Survivor 44 is great. One wonders if that 2020 roundtable wombled its way to the producers. Even if daily life is ten dogs sipping ten coffee cups in ten house fires, Survivor managed to clamber up a few rungs on the ladder of righteousness. The Bear’s true hamminess and cornball fakery lost me and Black Mirror is now low-key disgusting, the inverse of all it once was. No thanks! I need some light in my cave!
