Spoilers ahead!! This is your final warning!!!

Congrats to the winner of The Traitors US Season 4, Rob Rausch and his snake tattoos:

This season of Traitors US has been both riveting and a big f*cking disappointment. But mostly, it is an accurate depiction of how white supremacy, patriarchy, and America work. While some people may be shocked with the twists and turns, black and brown people have been in discourse that this is BAU (business as usual) for our society since the beginning of the show.

I’m a huge fan of reality TV, so when Traitors first came out with Survivor legend Cirie Fields and Below Deck icon Kate Chastain, my interest was peaked. Add in certified dumb jock Ryan Lochte, a few other CBS reality competition superstars, and put them in a room with normies: I was hooked.

Traitors season 1 premiered on January 12, 2023. A time before big tech’s shocking rounds of mass layoff, a time where we still pretended to appreciate and care about DEI, and a time before Twitter became X, before Trump was indicted, before Gaza was leveled by Israel.

I’ve always loved reality TV as an intimate look at human nature, interpersonal relationships, and sociological ideas. But now, in the context of 2026, in the midst of Trump’s second term, Target’s continued dedication to being anti-DEI, and the explicit rise of our technofeudalist overlords, the repeated patterns of patriarchal white supremacy and capitalism have been hard to stomach.

It’s not just the Traitors US: Survivor 49 (last season) saw every single black or dark skinned person get voted off one after the other right after the merge. Love Is Blind Ohio is currently featuring a man who IS HALF BLACK, but rejecting a stunning Afro-Latina woman because he “only dates white girls.” There are sooo many more examples, we’d be here all day if I tried to list more.

Here’s the thing. To most non-marginalized people, this doesn’t even cross their minds as strange. Or if it does, it’s relatively easy to say “huh that seems weird” but brush off the feeling and go back to being entertained. As an intersectional person of color who has lived the majority of my life in predominantly white spaces, I see it so clearly, I’m basically predicting it before it happens. Because it happens every time like clockwork.

But why do I feel compelled to write about Traitors US Season 4 when I kept my complaints about Survivor 49 to the group chat? Because while a powerhouse woman was able to be the Sole Survivor despite it all, Rob Rausch winning Traitors US adds a layer to this microcosm of American society that last season of Survivor missed.

Love Island Rob is HOTT with two t’s. Tall, tanned, floppy hair, muscled arms, he appears to be an “ideal” American man. I watched his season of Love Island USA and fell for him like Leah and everyone else, until it was clear he was an overgrown manchild who knows how he looks and how to use it to his advantage. The absolute ICK of his tantrum when he jumped in the pool after being called out (accurately mind you) by Leah was the beginning of the end for my and our collective love for Rob. Personally I went through a rollercoaster of emotions watching Rob that season — from full heart eyes emoji, to ick, to hope he could redeem himself, to full on disgust — that I actually forgot all about him and was confused why he was even cast on this season of the Traitors.

It actually makes PERFECT sense, it the grand scheme of America. The same traits that made Rob a horrible candidate as a boyfriend/Love Island winner are the exact same traits that made him a Traitors winner. He took us on the same rollercoaster of emotions: from seriously thirsty and thinking he could do no wrong, to confused that he was turning on his female traitor partners in favor of Colton (anyone got eyes on Love Island USA Aaron??), to full dissatisfaction that he won relatively unscathed.

I’m not saying he didn’t deserve to win this season. I think he played a great game and it was the only ending that made sense with the way this season shook out. However, he had a seriously easy path to winning due to the deeply engrained nature of a patriarchal system and white supremacy.

I think if you look up pretty privilege in the dictionary after last night, you’ll see Rob’s face. It’s hard to disentangle his ability to strategize and manipulate from the blindness of his cast mates enamored by his physique. What is clear, however, is everyone else around him upheld the norms of patriarchy and white supremacy (literally to a T) to enable Rob to win.

It started with selecting two House Wives to be fellow traitors with Rob. I have to believe that production wanted to balance out the heavy “gamer” play from previous seasons by giving the Housewives an advantage in season 4. What that did, however, was give Rob the perfect people to manipulate to give him the clearest path to a win.

The Traitors first banished Ian Terry, winner of Big Brother and seemingly the smartest person in the room. When you have a bunch of dummies in charge, of course they will be immediately found out by a strategic gameplay superfan like Ian, so this was a great move by Rob and co. Then at the first round table, where the contestants really have nothing to go on, the whole house decided to vote out Porsha Williams, a black Housewife. Whether consciously or subconsciously, voting out the black people first keeps the numbers with white people and those who align themselves with whiteness.

For the following banishments and murders, we see the next expendable folks in American society eliminated in succession: Donna Kelce, 72 year old mother of football stars; Tiffany Mitchell, mastermind of The Cookout alliance on Big Brother that allowed 4 black people to make it to the end for the first time in 23 seasons; Monet X Change, black drag queen and nonbinary queer person; Michael Rapaport, offputting older white man who became a liability for the entire house; Ron Funches, black (and recently diagnosed autistic) comedian who wasn’t trying to make everyone his BFF in the castle and it pissed off judgmental (read:racist) Housewives like Dorinda; Yam Yam Arocho, winner of Survivor 44 who happens to be Puerto Rican and gay.

After the departure of Yam Yam, the only black person left was Traitor Candiace Dillard Bassett. Once Rob threw Lisa Rinna under the bus in front of everyone to elevate himself as a faithful in everyone’s minds, it was a showdown between a smart black woman and hot all-American boy. Unfortunately, the hot all-American boy is going to win most every time.

Candiace even left the entire remaining cast clues by voting for Rob, TWICE at the round table. And yet, she was ignored in favor of upholding the power of a Love Islander who bats his eyelashes and provides the eye candy. Ask yourself, have you ever been in a situation where a black woman with receipts was ignored and dismissed, only to have the truth be revealed by a less smart/tenured/experienced white person down the line?

The remaining eliminations were an interesting depiction of white superiority and patriarchal hierarchy in America: we again eliminate older women (regardless of race), followed by “model minority” Asians, gay white men, and easy-to-manipulate white women (Olympic gold medalist Tara Lipinski, more on Maura Higgins soon).

Now, if you’re still with me, the most overt “white women vs. every other marginalized person” crimes were seemingly started by Tara when she said to Natalie Anderson (Sri Lankan-American winner of Survivor 29 and certified badass), “I don’t think you’re a traitor” but voted to eliminate her anyway and proceeded to cry about her own feelings rather than acknowledge the complete disrespect and switch up she pulled straight to Natalie’s face as Natalie left the competition.

You could see how genuinely affected Natalie was by this complete 180 in Tara’s voting strategy. Tara promised to Natalie that she and Johnny Weir would vote alongside Natalie to vote out Rob. However, in the end, Tara chose to align herself with white supremacy EVEN THOUGH she “knew” Natalie wasn’t a traitor. Why keep Rob around when there’s doubt around him when “your gut” is telling you Natalie is a Faithful? Because rather than open up a potential conflict with Rob (clear “leader” of the Faithfuls at this point in the game), she chose to protect herself within the hierarchy of patriarchy by aligning herself with whiteness first, and femininity second.

Mark and Johnny were kept around as long as they were helpful to Rob in his quest to steal all the money from everyone at the end, because he knew (and we knew) that they were not a threat to the “top dog” in the hierarchical system established in this game. While it was clear to us viewers that Rob only selected Eric Nam (K-pop star and final person of color standing at the end of the game) because he was gullible and honest, it was devastating to Eric to ultimately find out that these were traits Rob could exploit for his gain — and did.

Eric was both backstabbed by Rob and Maura at the end. Eric being a person of color (albeit one of the lightest skinned ones in the castle), was ultimately the reason he was voted out. I don’t believe it was a conscious or racist elimination in Maura’s intention. I do believe that Maura believed that by aligning herself with Rob faithfully and blindly, she assumed that this “white m[a]n w[ould] one day reward [her] by handing over some of their power” (Lecia Michelle, Medium), or in this case, prize money.

This is how Rob (and men like him) utilize the structures of patriarchy and white supremacy for their unending gain: because white women face sexism, they attempt to protect themselves from it by aligning with white men (for example, white women have voted Republican for the better part of the last 70 years), though it is against their better interests. Because of Maura’s male-centered nature, Rob was able to convince her to vote with him for basically the entire game, EVEN WHEN her intuition was telling her to vote differently.

The result was to be expected: Rob made it to the end with Maura, but because he was a Traitor, he won all the prize money. Maura was S T U N N E D. It made for good TV (if you ignore all the undertones of the entire game and had short term memory loss for Eric’s slap in the face of a departure). But it also showed how in the end, the individualistic nature of white supremacy, supersedes the innate need for connection we all feel as humans (in this case white women looking for connection from white men) and leaves us all feeling unsatisfied and icky.

Rob tried to explain his insane manipulation skills and self-preserving strategy away by constantly repeating “it’s just a game” and “would you give $100K to a person you just met 3 weeks ago?”, when in fact, last season ended with a group of four Faithfuls who DID split the money after having just met. White supremacy tells us we need to win at all costs, because quantity is greater and more valuable than quality (of “progress,” of relationships, of our humanness).

At the end of the day, this is a tale as old as time for America and American culture. There will be many more Robs and Mauras and Taras, and black and brown people earnestly entering gameplay only to be voted off first, second, and third. And quite frankly, I’m f*cking tired of it.

I will continue to tune into reality competition programs (because I myself am not going to dismantle white supremacy and patriarchy alone and I have to live in this hellscape of a dictatorship masquerading as a democracy like everyone else where entertainment is necessary to survive it), but I will not stop pointing out the obvious and overt displays of what ultimately is racism.

I hope the casting directors of The Traitors hear the feedback (doubtful, if you watched the reunion at all) and do their best to curb the implicit bias on future seasons. Unfortunately I don’t think that will happen if more white people don’t do the work to dismantle internalized sexism, white superiority, and patriarchal ideals within themselves first.

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