lacks and whites talking frankly, face- to-face about race is rare in our society.
That’s what gives FX’s new six-episode series “Black.White.” its emotional punch.
But the hook for the reality series, the thing that will get folks tuning in, is the gimmick.
Two families – one white, one black – agree to undergo extensive and rather convincing makeup transformations that make them appear to be of the other race.
The white family – Bruno Marcotulli, Carmen Wurgel and 18-year-old daughter Rose Bloomfield of Santa Monica, Calif. – and the black family – Brian and Renee Sparks, and 17-year-old son Nick, of Atlanta – initially bubble with excitement at the notion of finding out how the other race lives.
Excitement soon gives way to a more sobering reality.
Some of the brushes with racism are subtle. Brian marvels that, disguised as a white man, someone in a store slips a shoe onto his foot for the first time instead of just handing it to him.
Other encounters are as jarring as being doused with a cold bucket of water. When Brian sits in disguise in an all-white focus group discussing race, a man talks about his discomfort at even shaking a black man’s hand, and his inclination to wipe his palm on his pant leg afterward.
“Whites don’t have to go through the … things we go through … (but) when I actually donned the white makeup, I was shocked,” Brian says after the session.
But race involves far more than pigmentation, and the divides in American society are often about class as much as they are about skin color. The gimmick fails to acknowledge the role that history, family and experience play in shaping racial identity.
Indeed, the whole notion of “passing” – usually a light- skinned black posing as white – has long been a controversial topic. We were reminded just this week of an example: Effa Manley, co-owner of the New Jersey-based Eagles of the Negro Leagues, became the first woman inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame. She was white, but married a black man and passed as black.
The notion that anyone in the show is actually experiencing life as a person of the other race seems naive. The same criticism was made of John Howard Griffin’s race-changing chronicle “Black Like Me” in 1961.
Griffin, a journalist, wrote the book after darkening his skin with medication and a sunlamp, and spending time in the South. The book and subsequent film were a sensation among whites, but blacks were more skeptical. Many seemed to take the view expressed by Malcolm X in his autobiography: “If it was a frightening experience for him as nothing but a make-believe Negro for 66 days, then you think about what real Negroes in America have gone through for 400 years.”
A little skepticism about the disguise approach does not mean the show is a failure. Far from it. The series was the focus of an “Oprah Winfrey Show” weeks before its debut, and once it airs Wednesday, the show is likely to spur plenty of other conversations across the dinner table, around the water cooler and over the Internet.
Along with going to church, poetry slam classes, restaurants, shopping malls and other public spots in disguise, the families also agree to share a home in the L.A. area for several weeks. And home is where everyone lets it all hang out, and the series steps firmly on the emotional third rail of American culture.
It’s where the tense conversations about race play out. Brian and Bruno engage in verbal battles, with Brian trying to get Bruno to see the daily slights of racism, and Bruno insistent that Brian and other blacks are simply too sensitive.
“It’s important to me for him to see what blacks deal with on a day-to-day basis,” Brian says. “I’m not sure Bruno is getting the black experience.”
Brian is so polite. The truth is Bruno is pigheaded, and his take on what constitutes racism is outdated and naive.
“I look forward to someone saying, ‘Hey, (N-word),” and then not reacting,” he tells Brian and Renee.
That never happens, and the Sparks try to explain that today’s racism is more subtle, more of a wink and a nod than a slap in the face.
If anything, the simmering conflict between Carmen and Renee is even tauter, especially after Carmen tosses a “Yo, bitch” at Renee during a dialect class, assuming it’s a friendly exchange between African-American women. It quickly becomes more like “Yo, duck.”
Carmen and Bruno get a rare glimpse outside their own world when they go, with a black friend, to an African- American neighborhood in L.A. with Carmen as herself and Bruno in disguise. The hostile stares and comments they get as an interracial couple leave them shaken and Carmen in tears.
The most refreshing perspective comes from Nick Sparks, a quiet kid who has had a lot of trouble in school and in most ways seems adrift. But on the issue of race, he insists his generation simply does not see things the way the parents do.
“I don’t see the point of this racism thing,” he says. “My parents, they experience it. I don’t.”
Actor and musician Ice Cube, one of the show’s executive producers, says if that’s the sound of the future, maybe things are getting better after all.
Staff writer Edward P. Smith can be reached at 303-820-1767 or at esmith@denverpost.com.
“Black.White.”
REALITY TV|A six-episode series about two families that switch racial identity; 11 p.m. Wednesday, on cable FX.
