F/X Plays the Race Card

By Sheerly Avni, Truthdig. Posted March 15, 2006.

UPDATE: The show's producers, under fire from its participants, alter parts of the show that were deceptive. Episode 2 of the show airs Wednesday, March 15.

"Black.White.," a six-part series that debuted last night on the FX channel, bills itself as groundbreaking and provocative television, a fearless exploration of racial tension in America. In theory, it could be.

Its premise is provocative enough: Two families -- one black, one white --are made to live in the same house for six weeks in the San Fernando Valley, with camera crews following them around as they grapple with the impact of skin color in America.

Plus, there's a twist: Before almost every day of shooting, the families undergo three hours of makeup magic to effect a complete swap of their racial identities. Brian, Renee and Nick Sparks, a black family from Atlanta, get spray-painted pale skin, light-colored wigs and everything else it will take for them to pass as white. The white family -- Bruno Marcotulli, his girlfriend Carmen Wurgel, and Carmen's daughter Rose -- are all made up to look black.

And the conceit works, thanks to the show's makeup experts, whose previous credits include the race-swapping comedy "White Chicks," the gender-bending film "Big Momma's House" and the spectacularly gruesome "The Passion of the Christ." Made up in skin drag, both families are let loose on the streets of Los Angeles, followed by either hidden cameras or a crew that tells curious passersby only that it is "shooting a documentary on families."

As the series unfolds, we watch 18-year-old Rose -- adorable in a shellacked wig and slathered in enough dark foundation to almost obliterate her teenage acne -- try to make her way through an Afro-centric spoken-word poetry workshop. Forty-one-year-old Brian Sparks, on the other hand, hidden behind an unfortunate but very effective red mustache, sits in on a focus group on racial attitudes among white men, and must endure hearing one of the men in the group admitting that, after he shakes a black man's hand, he feels compelled to wash his own.

Meanwhile, 48-year-old Carmen -- an attractive blond location scout with heavily aerobicized triceps and a proud liberal heritage ("my parents were active in the civil rights movement") -- has to shop for outfits for herself and her boyfriend for their visit to an all-black church. Carmen's choice? An African-print dashiki.

If all this sounds like a Chappelle skit gone to graduate school, that's because it sort of is.

Gangsta-rapper-turned-actor Ice Cube served as the show's co-executive producer, in addition to writing its theme song, "Race Card." R.J. Cutler, who made the groundbreaking 1993 documentary "The War Room," a behind-the-scenes look at Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign, is the one who developed the idea. Cutler hesitates to call the film a documentary, but he has also taken great pains to distance the series from the much maligned and wholly contrived world of reality TV, calling it instead a "reality experiment." As you might imagine, the project has not been free of controversy. Nelson George, an eminent hip-hop journalist, activist and himself a producer of a documentary about race in America, went so far as to tell the Los Angeles Times that this kind of television is "phony and dangerous."

Phony, maybe, but not dangerous. The white adults -- Bruno and Carmen -- are a parody of smug ignorance, fond of expressions like "I'm coming from a place of …" and "I want to speak with an open heart." But it's Bruno, a 47-year-old substitute teacher -- the kind who you just know tries to high-five the kids and doesn't even notice their snickers -- whose behavior most begs for a smackdown.

Bruno is full of hokum about "personal responsibility," and "getting back from the universe what you give to the universe," and good or bad energy, but what he is most excited about, he tells his incredulous housemates, is the chance to be called a "nigger" by an unsuspecting stranger.

Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based writer.

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