We haven't killed each other yet -- anyone else amazed?

I was scrolling down the headlines at Yahoo News the other day, when I came across this article about the new season of survivor.

Essentially, next season, the "survivors" will be separated into 4 teams by race: Black, White, Latinos and Asians (thanks for the correction, Morphy). "Segregated" according to the article.

My initial reaction was one of disbelief. The concept just struck me as utterly and completely wrong. In a day and age, where people tend to be overly sensitive about EVERYTHING -- how could the network think this was an acceptable concept?

Neil, on the other hand, didn't seem to understand why there were people protesting (other than the aforementioned -- people are overly sensitive to EVERYTHING) and posed the question -- how is it any different than the Olympics, where you pit country against country, nationality against nationality?

I counter-argued that they were pitting Americans against Americans (people living within the same country) -- but then mid-sentence I thought, why should that matter? The world is a competitive place and we all have different strengths and weaknesses. Don't we all compete daily for jobs,in sports, in life at large??? Are people of different ethnicity's not competing against one another everyday in well -- everything?? Why should this matter?

Why can't there be a positive competitive spirit from this? Why do people always fear the worst? Are we so pre-conditioned to believe the worst that we honestly believe that race relations in 2006 are so bad they can't withstand a reality TV show?

Neil also wanted me to add -- that the creators of Survivor stole this idea from South Park.