First wife swap, now race swap ...
· New reality show explores America's great divide
· Families exchange colour for six-week experiment
Julian Borger in Washington Thursday March 9, 2006
In Hollywood race is the new sex. Days after Crash beat Brokeback Mountain at the Oscars, reality television is taking a rest from engineering on-screen couplings to experiment with racial role-swapping.
Black. White. made by the Fox network's FX channel, uses advanced make-up techniques to turn a black family white and a white family black, and then send them out into Los Angeles equipped with hidden cameras. For six weeks, the families share a house and compare notes.
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The aim, the programme-makers say, was to trigger a debate, and it seemed to be doing that even before the first episode aired last night. But it also showed that race in 21st century America is a nuanced and complicated issue.
Under the veil of racial tolerance - the participants all described themselves as open-minded and liberal - the black and white families still made each other wince. In the first episode, Carmen Wurgel, the white woman in the show, asks if she should talk "jive" while in black make-up. She calls her black counterpart "bitch", thinking it a term of endearment, and then causes tension when she gushes about"a beautiful black creature".
Ms Wurgel's boyfriend, Bruno Marcotulli, disguised as a black man, insists he cannot wait to be denigrated. "I look forward to having someone say, 'Hey, ******,' you know, 'You're a son of a bitch.' 'I hate you, ******'." He repeats the word until the real black man in the programme, Brian Sparks, looks ready to hit him.
After a few days in black make-up Mr Marcotulli tells Mr Sparks that most of his problems with race are in his mind: "I'm trying to enlighten you to the fact that you've got to approach life in a certain way and not expect you're being mistreated because you're black."
Out in the real world, the Sparks family hear a man in a bar boast that the local district as the "last unaffected bastions of middle-class Caucasian America". A white man tells Mr Sparks' wife, Renee, that his parents taught him to wash after shaking hands with a black person. Mr Sparks, made up as white, marvels when a shop assistant at a country club stoops to slip a shoe onto his foot. "It's never happened to me as a black in 40 years, but the first time I go and buy shoes as a white, I have it done," he exclaims.
The producers of Black. White. made efforts to ensure the show would not offend, putting on a special screening for the NAACP, the country's most venerable black organisation. Apparently, it passed muster. Oprah Winfrey loved it, and invited all the participants on to her show to share their experiences.
The show - produced by RJ Cutler, an Oscar-nominated documentary maker and the rapper, Ice Cube - is a contemporary take on an idea that is nearly half a century old. In 1961, a white journalist, John Howard Griffin, published Black Like Me, an account of what happened when he dyed his skin and travelled around the segregated South as a black man. The results stunned white readers at the time. Mr Griffin's home town went as far as hanging the author in effigy.
The race issue is now more subtle, and the producers had to look harder for evidence that showed up on video. Some critics have complained that the show trivialises race. The programme makers are also under fire for orchestrating some of the friction. White people who had positive racial attitudes were mostly edited out. Some of the situations seem contrived. "There were some moments that were true but others that were designed a little or genetically modified," Mrs Wurgel said later.
Nelson George, a black filmmaker told the Los Angeles Times: "When race is featured on shows like this, one of the agendas is to create racial tension... What this show seems to be doing is taking an important subject and trivialising it."
Mr Cutler rejected the criticism and defended his use of artistic license. "My goal is to tell a story, to tell the experience that these people had over the course of six weeks, and tell those stories as truthfully as possible, the conflicts they had," he said.
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