The Challenge has a long, troubling history of tolerating racist behavior

The Daily Beast

Contestant Dee Nguyen's firing early this month over her anti-Black Lives Matter tweets "prompted a lot more than just an eye-roll from viewers on social media—and not just because MTV needlessly decided to edit her out of the rest of the season," says Kyndall Cunningham. "It didn’t take long for fans and former cast members on Twitter to call out the show’s long, troubling history of tolerating racist behavior and question the optics of MTV enforcing such severe punishment on one of the network’s only Asian stars. Throughout its 22-year run, The Challenge—which has entire Reddit threads dedicated to its racist moments—has seen white contestants dress up in blackface, call Black cast members racial slurs, and taunt them in other racially charged ways without so much as a slap on the wrist from production." Cunningham adds: "In light of this new stance, The Challenge’s format—which puts cast members from Real World, Road Rules and, more recently, any reality program featuring attractive twentysomethings in a Survivor/Big Brother-like competition—has also proven to be problematic as cast members’ controversies from previous reality shows have begun to resurface."