Survivor and Racism?

The upcoming season of Survivor will start off with four tribes. The tribes will each be made up of people from a separate ethnicity. The tribes are the: African-American Tribe, Asian-American Tribe, Hispanic Tribe, and White Tribe (Why not Caucasian?).

Now I'm fairly sure this is mostly just a publicity stunt by CBS. There's only one winner in Survivor, a person not a tribe, and the normally the don't go many episodes before 4 tribes merge into 2 (so it want be "racial war" for long). As you might expect, this is starting to draw alot of criticism. Is it a non-threatening, interesting social experiment as Survivor is claiming, or is it a throw back to the bad days of segregation?

A previous season started out with tribes divided by gender and age, and that caused practically zero controversy. Is race that much more of a volatile issue? Is Survivor wrong to do this?

Here's some news articles about it (look on the right-hand side of the screen).


Technorati tags: Survivor Racism