“Black.White” Show is Not Racial Enlightment, Just Bad Make-Up
Story by Elizabeth Gonzalez
Ilustration by Adrian Avila

So now you can own your own DVD copy of the F/X show “Black.White.” and the only reason I could see anyone buying it would be for educational purposes of getting to the points that the show didn't get to on its own. The show was hyped up like other shows that throw out the word “controversy” with anything associated with race. All these types of shows now, like Survivor and even Real World at times, seem to classify themselves as social experiments without any attempts to answer the questions that they potentially raise. For example, how do people after six weeks of supposedly living another's experience not get changed themselves?

The show “Black.White,” is produced by Ice Cube and R.J. Cutler for the F/X   television network. The show takes the Sparkses, a black family from Atlanta and the Warguls, a white family from Santa Monica and has them live in the same house in the San Fernando Valley for six weeks. Every day they endured three hours of make up work for the members of the white family to be made to look black and the black family made to look white. They are then sent out to LA to have their experiences of being in another's skin taped. I admire the show, although that does not mean that I agree with the way it was carried out or that I even liked what I saw on that show, because it often upset me and had me yelling at the tv – but I still wanted to watch.

What I did like is that it attempted to have people share an experience that could possibly change their lives. And because we learn through experience we would assume that living in the shoes of another person would allow you to learn something different from your own experience and change your beliefs. But as a father from the series proves it –- as adults we don't come into any experience with a blank slate in our mind. Bruno, is part of the Warguls family who are transformed to appear black. Throughout the show when he is confronted with issues of racism his reaction to it came from whatever he already “knows” as true. It didn't cause him to have any “ah-ah” moments where he actually saw anything from the Sparkses family point of view or anyone elses for that matter. He was set in his ways and had trouble even listening to other peoples comments during conversations. He was portrayed as a racist who didn't even know it.

Years and years of personal beliefs that we have learned or taught ourselves, dictate our new experiences. So, even when our new experiences contradict our beliefs, it doesn't necessarily change our ideas. It could become an exception to our own rules. We can rationalize the event in our minds to agree with our current beliefs – because this is the way we have ordered our world, we want to keep it that way without adding any further distress to our lives that would force us to recreate a world view and our place in it. This is what Bruno seemed to do very well.

At best the show could have really been a life changing experience for those involved, but it has left us with the question: If personal experience isn't the conduit to change for everyone, then what else available to us would be able to transform our ideas?  

Television shows of course are made to bring in the viewers, not change their worlds. But for a moment we could have expected more from the people who consume our eyes while they leave our minds empty. And now that “Black.White” reruns pack the night slots, this show might still have people talking, but it doesn't have us answering any serious questions when the deepest we can get people talking about is how the make-up didn't look real and commenting that of course racism still exists in the US and always will.   It doesn't have to be that way.

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