You haven’t been redirected to an article on The Onion, this is a real controversy making its rounds on the Internet right now. If you haven’t heard about this yet, let me break it down for you. On a recent episode of the Jeopardy! College Championship, three white contestants saved the “African American History” category for last. See this shocking display for yourself at around the 15:55 mark:
Oh gosh, did that make you all as uncomfortable as it made me? Just to clarify, by “as uncomfortable” I mean not uncomfortable at all.
I happen to love Jeopardy! College Championship Week, because it’s about the only week I can get more than four questions (or answers, technically) correct, and it gives me back a lot of the self-confidence Jeopardy! has stolen from me over the years. …Let’s be honest, solving the puzzle on Wheel of Fortune doesn’t have the same sense of accomplishment as correctly answering a question on Jeopardy!, especially in the final round. (On an unrelated note, I wonder if the creators of Jeopardy! regret putting the exclamation point in the name of the game. I’m not always excited about Jeopardy! [see how that just didn't feel right?].)
During the segment in question, the categories were “Thomas, Write?,” “Weather Verbs,” “International Cinema Showcase,” “Talk Nerdy to Me,” “Kiwi Fauna,” and of course “African American History” (why did I put that category last when alphabetically it comes first!? I’m not being prejudiced–it just came last on the board; blame Jeopardy! for that one). The Internet is ablaze with commentary because these three white college students chose categories like “Kiwi Fauna,” “International Cinema Showcase,” and “Weather Verbs” before tapping into the “African American History” category. Some sources even alleged that the egregious avoidance of this Jeopardy! category was a subtle display of racism.
Aside from that being one of the most ridiculous, reaching allegations I’ve ever read about a few game show contestants, there’s a perfectly logical explanation as to why “African American History” was the last category standing. I’ve been waiting a long time for the day to come that we overanaylze the category choices of Jeopardy! contestants, so let’s get to the bottom of this:
These college students probably weren’t intimidated by the “Thomas, Write?” category because it has the words “Thomas” and “write” in it. I can think of about five famous men named Thomas off the top of my head (Jefferson, Paine, Edison, Mann, Crapper) and the word “write” likely puts these students at ease because they’ve probably perfected the art of writing a paper two hours before the class in which its due. The contestants probably assumed one of the answers for “Weather Verbs” would be precipitation, and just about any person who’s sat through the painful eight minute weather segment of the news, with all its maps and pressure systems, is probably knowledgeable enough to be successful with that category. If these college students are pretentious enough to actually sign up and appear on Jeopardy!, I wouldn’t put it past any of them to have a snobby hobby like watching a bunch of foreign films with subtitles in their dorm rooms, which means “International Cinema Showcase” is right in their wheelhouse. “Talk Nerdy to Me” also doesn’t require an explanation, because look at the contestants:
I’m willing to bet one of them can speak Klingon, and my money’s on Tucker.
“Kiwi Fauna” is the one category that might have everyone scratching their heads–the small, hairy testicles of the fruit world and sauna with an f? What the fuck is that? Well, these twenty-something college students know better than that. You see, they probably know that Lorde, the popular singer, is from New Zealand–a country whose inhabitants are nicknamed “Kiwis.” This nickname is derived from a flightless bird native to New Zealand (yeah I don’t know what the fuck is going on over there, either). Fauna usually accompanies the word “flora,” and it means “animals.” Candidly, if I were a contestant on this episode of Jeopardy!, I would have chosen Kiwi Fauna just because how many times will I have the opportunity to say “Kiwi Fauna for $1000″ on national TV? I hate to say this, but that’s a YOLO moment if ever there was one.
Not to mention, am I the only viewer who’s noticed that typically the hardest category is put in the column furthest to the right? At any rate, that’s typically the column that contestants save for last, and I think a lot of it has to do with the fact we read from left to right. Am I being as speculative as the people who suggest the contestant’s avoidance of “African American History” was a low-key racial slight? Perhaps.
It’s not completely illogical that “African American History” was the category that was left, and in past episodes of Jeopardy!, categories like “Obscure Russian Authors” and “Common Phrases from the 1900s” have endured a similar fate. I know everyone feels especially icky about it because it’s Black History Month, but I think that kind of makes this all the more ridiculous. I don’t think the intentional or unintentional avoidance of the “African American History” category tells us anything about these contestants feelings about African Americans, because they’re on a gameshow. When they finally received clues from the “African American History” category, they got three out of the five questions correct. Apparently, these ignorant crackers don’t know about the Scottsboro Boys and the FRhode Island Regiment.
Well, I have an embarrassing confession to make here: I don’t think I’d be able to come up with those answers, either. It’s not because I don’t care about African American history or African Americans, and it certainly has nothing to do with the color of my skin, it’s because I just haven’t learned it. Some of the responsibility for that ignorance is on me, but I think a lot of school programs gloss over African American History. We get a little information about The Civil Rights Movement, Rosa Parks, boycotts, and Martin Luther King, and pretty soon we’re moving on to learning about three branches of government again. Admittedly, I could stand to learn a lot more about African American history (I think a lot of us probably could), and if these three college kids avoided this category because they didn’t want to put those lapses in their history knowledge on blast, I don’t exactly blame them.
To take a step back from the TV screen and look at the bigger picture, we’ve come a long way, but there are unfortunately still so many instances of prejudice and racism in the world today–and most often, they don’t show up on a beloved afternoon gameshow. When we try to turn circumstances like this into something more than what they are, we risk overlooking true cases of hate. Moreover, media sensations like this only serve to trivialize prejudice in the eyes of those who perpetuate it. When it comes to this Jeopardy! debacle, I do think we’re being too sensitive, and I think it’s sad that there are comments flying around the Internet that these contestants “showed their true colors” or “They avoided it because you liberals made race issues a very touchy subject, you are the true racists.” Is this what we’re about?