Don’t judge a book by its cover, says NBC game show Identity
by Carmen Van Kerckhove
There’s a new game show coming to NBC, hosted by Penn from Penn & Teller, that sounds like it has the potential to be pretty awful, race-wise. (Thanks to Dorothy for the tip!)
Basically, contestants have to guess who someone is, going just by their appearance. Here’s the official description from NBC’s web site:
In this intense game of impulse and reasoning where keen perception and instincts can lead to big money, each new contestant faces 12 new strangers and a list of 12 new identities. The game unfolds as the contestant picks an identity - ranging anywhere from a profession to a shoe size - and tries to match it with one of the 12 strangers. The amount of money the contestant accumulates increases with each correctly identified stranger. If all 12 are matched up correctly, the player is rewarded with the top prize of $500,000.
The “identities” given on the web site are things like felon, narcoleptic, insomniac, virgin, 200 IQ. But you have to wonder how race is going play into people’s assumptions. I guess we’ll see how it all turns out.
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of 
HighJive wrote:
On a barely-related tip, vh1 aired a segment on interracial relationships. During the program, a hip-hop artist was blindfolded and challenged to guess the ethnicity of three women giving him lap dances. The guy guessed correctly.
Posted 13 Dec 2006 at 3:09 pm ¶
Carmen Van Kerckhove wrote:
HighJive, actually that show (Ego Trip presents Race-o-Rama) is a couple years old. And that’s the clip I always use to open my workshop on myths and realities of interracial relationships.
Never fails to get the conversation going.
Posted 13 Dec 2006 at 3:17 pm ¶
RobynT wrote:
I saw the preview last night and I think this show looks interesting. I guess it’s too much to hope that it will actually make people examine stereotypes…
Posted 13 Dec 2006 at 3:38 pm ¶
Koko wrote:
I saw Ego-Trips too. I think(or at least I hope) it was all a planned joke and none of those 1000 stereotypes thrown out within 3 hrs. were a joke.
Posted 13 Dec 2006 at 11:44 pm ¶
SolShine7 wrote:
I’m not a fan of game shows out-side of Jeopardy, because most of them are pointless. At least with Jeopardy you can learn something of substance.
This one reminds of the game show in Catch Me If You Can with Leonardo DeCaprio.
Posted 14 Dec 2006 at 2:32 am ¶