Surviving the Crisis: Diversity and Multiculturalism in <i>Survivor</i> ’s New Era

As one of the longest running reality television programs in America, Survivor offers a unique opportunity to explore how reality television meets the needs of “real life,” particularly in a conjunctural moment marked by racial reckoning. In this essay, we analyze two pivotal moments from Season 41 and 42 of Survivor , colloquially referred to as the show’s “new era” following a network-wide diversity mandate. By performing a textual analysis of two tribal council scenes, we explore how racial politics complicate the stories Survivor tells about itself–and, in turn, how Survivor frames these scenes to collapse racial discourse into discourse about gameplay. We argue that Survivor attempts to meet the exigencies of the moment by presenting feel-good, or “happy” multiculturalism as central to Survivor ’s mythologies, and using these mythologies to justify “unhappy” multiculturalism, thereby preserving the whiteness inherent to the game itself.