how could this ultra-racist sequence have been broadcast?

During the famous Beijing Express game show, candidates had to identify black children in a school. Result: an embarrassing but above all, racist sequence.

Beijing Express is already in its fourteenth season, filmed in 2020 before the start of the coronavirus pandemic in Uganda. A program very popular with the general public, it also brings its share of scandals. After the death of a person hit by a car during the filming of the show in October 2020, then a sexist sequence at the beginning of March, the images of a test of March 9, 2021 made some of the audience uncomfortable. .

The scene in question? In the middle of a schoolyard, candidates draw lots for a photo of two children. Their mission is then to find the toddlers drawn. In the yard, a hundred black children in uniform, with shaved hair, to smooth out the differences in hairstyles. Problem: Candidates find that children are all alike …

On Twitter, viewers reacted to express their incomprehension.

A sequence that contributes to racism

On the Web, Internet users have justified the sequence by invoking a study by the University of Friborg, published in 2010 and explaining a cognitive bias that makes it more difficult to identify people of other ethnicities than his own, this because of the plasticity of the brain which arranges what it sees in large homogeneous sub-groups.

However, for others, the scene and the behavior of the candidates contribute to spreading a hackneyed racist stereotype, which assumes that "all black people are alike" (also works with other racialized human groups, such as Asians) . The idea being that there would be a real homogeneity between different groups of people, and not linked to cultural and racist biases.

Others finally point out that it is very strange that the ordeal, in which children are abducted, does not seem to pose a problem to anyone. Would it have been possible in Europe? Nothing is less sure..

Neither the production nor the candidates have yet expressed their views on this event.

Mathilde Wattecamps

Missions: Mathilde is an expert in subjects related to women's rights and health. Addicted to Instagram and Twitter, never stingy with a good …