Unfavorable Gypsy Encounter: The Amazing Race
Title: The Amazing Race Season 14
Type: TV-show
Genre: Reality TV
Airdate: March 8, 2009
The Amazing Race is an American reality TV-show where teams of two compete in a race around the world. According to Wikipedia:
“The race is generally split into twelve legs, with each leg requiring teams to deduce clues, navigate themselves in foreign areas, interact with locals, perform physical and mental challenges, and vie for airplane, boat, taxi, and other public transportation options on a limited budget provided by the show. Teams are progressively eliminated at the end of most legs, while the first team to arrive at the end of the final leg wins the grand prize of US$1 million.”
In an episode from its fourteenth season, the contestants are required to travel to Romania and in order to pay their homage to Nadia Comaneci go through a series of moves for three gymnastics disciplines: the balance beam, the parallel bars, and floor exercises before receiving their next clue.
The show is well intended and offers good bits of information about each country it visits. The contestants then went to Braşov, found their next clue in the culturally themed detour: Biserica Neagră and had to choose between two courses “Gypsy Moves” or “Vampire Remains.”
The trouble in this particular event came when, those who chose “Gypsy Moves” had to interact with gypsies and one contestant, Kris, left his fanny pack back at the camp which resulted in it being stolen.
This was the only episode I saw of this TV-show, and well, I must be some sort of unlucky, it has so many episodes and I see the one where the contestants come to Romania and get their stuff stolen. Ironically, it wasn’t even the worst part of it all, the event where the contestant came to the realization he had lost his fanny pack was more similar to the cherry on top. The gypsy settlement the contestants were interacting with were giving them weird looks, they were staring at them like one would at animals at the zoo and acted rather odd.
Josh Wolk, a New York Times editor, wrote about the episode on march 2nd, 2009 in an article titled “The Amazing Race recap: Gypsies, Vamps, and Thieves.” Oh yey…
“I don’t want to paint Gypsies with a stereotypical brush. I’d love to reveal that it turns out that everything you thought you knew about Gypsies was wrong, and that it turns out that they’re a misunderstood people with diverse interests. But judging from what I saw in that encampment, their interests seem limited to imitating a Fellini movie. Every time the producers cut to a wide shot, there was something really odd going on in the background. Some kid was pedaling a weird three-wheeled gadget across a wire, and somebody else was roller skiing; I kept waiting to see someone bounce by upside-down with a pogo stick strapped to his head. And all the while a crazy old lady cackled so long and hard that I prayed the camera wouldn’t tilt down, as it would inevitably reveal a spreading puddle underneath her. Remember when the people of Kazakhstan were so pissed at Sacha Baron Cohen for the way he portrayed their country in Borat? Well, that country came off like the Vatican compared to the way the Gypsies came off here.
Wait, I feel like I left out a Gypsy stereotype. Hmmm. Oh, right: They’re thieves! Kris, in first place with Amanda after finishing the Detour, realized he’d left his fanny pack back at camp, and he couldn’t find it there. Really? You’re going to leave all your money and passports in a gypsy camp and be surprised it’s not sitting right where you left it? Didn’t you ever watch The Riches, Kris?”
Not that I disagree too much with what he said but comparing the events from the show with the movie Borat, Romania in the movie being seen as Vatican in comparison to the Romania from the show seems a bit extreme. Whatever good intentions the show runners had, the events went from bad to worse and mostly just gave context and proof to already existing bad stereotypes.
