Confronting the racial divide
A tension-filled reality TV show, "Black.White.", takes on the sticky subject of race as two families swap the colors of their skin.
Felicia R. Lee, New York Times
Brian Sparks, a black man in whiteface, for the first time in his life had a salesman actually slip a shoe on his foot. Bruno Marcotulli, a white man in blackface, declared that the black Bruno and the white Bruno received the same general treatment. He was just waiting to be called a common racial epithet, he said, to show calmly how he would not allow the word to hurt him.
If race is the "third rail" of culture, as John Landgraf, president of the FX cable channel, believes, then his network's new series "Black.White." is high-voltage reality TV.
"Black.White.," a six-part documentary that debuts Wednesday (9 p.m. on FX), follows the race-swapping experiment of two families.
Original article with photos or
The white Wurgel-Marcotulli family of Santa Monica, Calif.,(along with Rose Bloomfield, the 17-year-old daughter of Carmen Wurgel), and the black Sparkses of Atlanta, including Sparks' wife, Renee, and 16-year-old Nick, undergo a racial transformation through the magic of sprayed-on color, wigs, contact lenses and other makeup tricks. The whites appear black; the blacks appear white.
"Black.White." is the debut of such a dramatic switch on television, the producers say, although such adventures in pigmentation have been the stuff of literature and film, from the 1961 book "Black Like Me," by John Howard Griffin, to the 2004 film "White Chicks," starring Shawn and Marlon Wayans.
This time, viewers see the families (who temporarily leave work and school) in the Los Angeles area, secretly integrating a bar with a bartending job (Sparks) or joining a black poetry group (Bloomfield). Mostly, the families try to get a taste of life in another skin as they shop, go to church or seek help with a broken-down car. For six weeks last summer, they even lived together in a big San Fernando Valley house, debating the meanings of their experience and sharing their lives.
At times the participants address the camera. They also sit around the dinner table, struggling to communicate. Renee Sparks, a 38-year-old dental office manager, declares she is "mad and angry at the same time" because Carmen Wurgel, a 48-year-old location scout, used the term "beautiful black creature" to describe a member of her daughter's poetry group. Wurgel says she is tired of being misinterpreted. "They already knew whites were insensitive and ignorant; I heard that from the beginning," Wurgel says.
Situations leave adults uneasy
"Somebody's feathers are going to get ruffled," Landgraf said, when asked about the reaction he anticipated to "Black.White.," whose participants have already taped an episode of "The Oprah Winfrey Show," the closest thing to a national town hall. "There is a lot less overt bigotry in America," Landgraf said, so he wanted to find a way to probe the subtler side of racial conflict. All the on-camera participants said they saw "Black.White." as a way to show how the emotional paper cuts of everyday interracial interactions can aggravate such bigger issues as discrimination in housing or employment. The adults, in particular, said they walked away feeling misunderstood by the other couple and frustrated by their inability to get into one another's skin.
"They really wanted me in this show to really come off at the end as, 'Gosh, I see' and 'Oh, my heart is open,' " Marcotulli, a 47-year-old substitute schoolteacher, said in a recent telephone interview. He is compassionate, he said, and he knows that racism exists. "But you know what? Life is tough for millions and millions and millions of people. And I just can't say, you know, 'Yes, the African-Americans, gosh, they have it tough and they deserve reparations and we should do everything we can.' No."
Renee and Brian Sparks, a 41-year-old computer expert, though, said they believed that Marcutolli had tended to shrug off the subtle racism he encountered from whites and waited to hear the racial slur, which they repeatedly told him was unlikely. They were right. They also said that the white couple had the misguided perception that they had needed a radical transformation to "pass" for black; at one point in the show, Bruno and Carmen buy African garb for a church service. Black people, the Sparkses said, are accustomed to being a minority and making small accommodations to blend in with whites, such as changing their speech patterns.
While the two teenagers did not engage in the same verbal skirmishes as the adults, Bloomfield challenged the notion that race was less fraught for their generation.
"I was kind of surprised to find that I learned more about this invisible barrier than I thought actually existed," said Bloomfield, now an 18-year-old aspiring actress. After participating in a rap poetry group and "coming out" as white to the black performers, she discovered that the group treated her differently.
Given that the producers deliberately sought families who identified themselves as progressive and open-minded, the differences in perspective exposed by "Black.White." are instructive, said R.J. Cutler, one of the executive producers.
"This show ends up being a critique of the notion of colorblindness as much as anything else," he said. "It's still blindness. And blindness is dangerous."
Felicia R. Lee, New York Times
Brian Sparks, a black man in whiteface, for the first time in his life had a salesman actually slip a shoe on his foot. Bruno Marcotulli, a white man in blackface, declared that the black Bruno and the white Bruno received the same general treatment. He was just waiting to be called a common racial epithet, he said, to show calmly how he would not allow the word to hurt him.
If race is the "third rail" of culture, as John Landgraf, president of the FX cable channel, believes, then his network's new series "Black.White." is high-voltage reality TV.
"Black.White.," a six-part documentary that debuts Wednesday (9 p.m. on FX), follows the race-swapping experiment of two families.
Original article with photos or
The white Wurgel-Marcotulli family of Santa Monica, Calif.,(along with Rose Bloomfield, the 17-year-old daughter of Carmen Wurgel), and the black Sparkses of Atlanta, including Sparks' wife, Renee, and 16-year-old Nick, undergo a racial transformation through the magic of sprayed-on color, wigs, contact lenses and other makeup tricks. The whites appear black; the blacks appear white.
"Black.White." is the debut of such a dramatic switch on television, the producers say, although such adventures in pigmentation have been the stuff of literature and film, from the 1961 book "Black Like Me," by John Howard Griffin, to the 2004 film "White Chicks," starring Shawn and Marlon Wayans.
This time, viewers see the families (who temporarily leave work and school) in the Los Angeles area, secretly integrating a bar with a bartending job (Sparks) or joining a black poetry group (Bloomfield). Mostly, the families try to get a taste of life in another skin as they shop, go to church or seek help with a broken-down car. For six weeks last summer, they even lived together in a big San Fernando Valley house, debating the meanings of their experience and sharing their lives.
At times the participants address the camera. They also sit around the dinner table, struggling to communicate. Renee Sparks, a 38-year-old dental office manager, declares she is "mad and angry at the same time" because Carmen Wurgel, a 48-year-old location scout, used the term "beautiful black creature" to describe a member of her daughter's poetry group. Wurgel says she is tired of being misinterpreted. "They already knew whites were insensitive and ignorant; I heard that from the beginning," Wurgel says.
Situations leave adults uneasy
"Somebody's feathers are going to get ruffled," Landgraf said, when asked about the reaction he anticipated to "Black.White.," whose participants have already taped an episode of "The Oprah Winfrey Show," the closest thing to a national town hall. "There is a lot less overt bigotry in America," Landgraf said, so he wanted to find a way to probe the subtler side of racial conflict. All the on-camera participants said they saw "Black.White." as a way to show how the emotional paper cuts of everyday interracial interactions can aggravate such bigger issues as discrimination in housing or employment. The adults, in particular, said they walked away feeling misunderstood by the other couple and frustrated by their inability to get into one another's skin.
"They really wanted me in this show to really come off at the end as, 'Gosh, I see' and 'Oh, my heart is open,' " Marcotulli, a 47-year-old substitute schoolteacher, said in a recent telephone interview. He is compassionate, he said, and he knows that racism exists. "But you know what? Life is tough for millions and millions and millions of people. And I just can't say, you know, 'Yes, the African-Americans, gosh, they have it tough and they deserve reparations and we should do everything we can.' No."
Renee and Brian Sparks, a 41-year-old computer expert, though, said they believed that Marcutolli had tended to shrug off the subtle racism he encountered from whites and waited to hear the racial slur, which they repeatedly told him was unlikely. They were right. They also said that the white couple had the misguided perception that they had needed a radical transformation to "pass" for black; at one point in the show, Bruno and Carmen buy African garb for a church service. Black people, the Sparkses said, are accustomed to being a minority and making small accommodations to blend in with whites, such as changing their speech patterns.
While the two teenagers did not engage in the same verbal skirmishes as the adults, Bloomfield challenged the notion that race was less fraught for their generation.
"I was kind of surprised to find that I learned more about this invisible barrier than I thought actually existed," said Bloomfield, now an 18-year-old aspiring actress. After participating in a rap poetry group and "coming out" as white to the black performers, she discovered that the group treated her differently.
Given that the producers deliberately sought families who identified themselves as progressive and open-minded, the differences in perspective exposed by "Black.White." are instructive, said R.J. Cutler, one of the executive producers.
"This show ends up being a critique of the notion of colorblindness as much as anything else," he said. "It's still blindness. And blindness is dangerous."