TV: Survivor and racism?

I'm a big fan of Andy Dehnart's Reality Blurred blog, where he provides commentary and news on the world of reality TV. But I think he's missing the boat in his commentary on last night's episode of Survivor.

If you've somehow missed all of the publicity surrounding this season's Controversial Twist, the 20 contestants were divided into tribes at the beginning of the season based on ethnicity -- Caucasian, African-American, Hispanic, Asian-American. Last night, the four tribes were merged into two though a complex process that guaranteed the new tribes would be as evenly mixed as possible by gender and ethnicity.

Members of the new tribes starting strategizing and forming alliances at once, and Dehnart suggests in his headline that these alliances are being made along racial lines. But they're not, really; players are -- as they almost always are at this point in the game -- remaining loyal to their original tribemates, and since the tribes were originally divided by race, that tribal loyalty might look like racial loyalty, or worse, racial exclusivity.

Even Jonathan's "I think we can align with a couple of the Asians" doesn't seem to be about race, really; the players had seven days in their original tribes, and very little interaction with the other tribes during that time. The tribal names were particularly interchangeable and hard to remember this year, and I'd have been amazed if Jonathan had learned those names well enough to say "I think we can align with some of the Hiki tribe" (or whichever one it was).

An earlier season of the show began with tribes of older men, younger men, older women, and younger women; if, after those groups had merged into two tribes, we'd heard one of the men say "I think we can align with a couple of the women," would we have assumed that that was about sexism or "gender wars"? No, it would just be the quickest and most convenient way to identify that group of people. And in a context where the show has begged the contestants to think of themselves and their competitors in racial terms, it's hardly shocking when a contestant grabs racial identity as the quickest and most convenient way to identify that group of people.

There are no "race wars" going on, just the usual struggle to be the dominant sub-tribe in the newly merged tribe. It will be interesting to see if the show itself attempts to portray what's happening as racial solidarity; I'll be keeping a close eye on Jeff Probst's questioning at the next few tribal councils.