Confronting America's Racial Divide, in Blackface and White

February 16, 2006
Confronting America's Racial Divide, in Blackface and White
By FELICIA R. LEE

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 makes its debut on March 8, follows the race-swapping experiment of two families. 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 Mr. Sparks's 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 (Mr. Sparks) or joining a black poetry group (Ms. 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.

The first episode ends with Mr. Sparks and Mr. Marcotulli (in black makeup) sitting in a van, refusing to meet each other's eyes. "I think, from your reaction today, you're looking for it," Mr. Marcotulli, a 47-year-old substitute schoolteacher, says of racism, which Mr. Sparks says he can discern after a lifetime in black skin. "You see what you want to see," he complains.

Mr. Sparks, a 41-year-old computer expert, snaps back, "And you don't see what you don't want to see."

At times the participants address the camera. They also sit around the dinner table, struggling to communicate. Ms. Sparks, a 38-year-old dental office manager, declares she is "mad and angry at the same time" because Ms. Wurgel, a 48-year-old location scout, used the term "beautiful black creature" to describe a member of her daughter's poetry group. Ms. Wurgel says she is tired of being misinterpreted. "They already knew whites were insensitive and ignorant; I heard that from the beginning," Ms. Wurgel says. The teenagers look embarrassed.

"Somebody's feathers are going to get ruffled," Mr. 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. "That's what people expect from our network: risks," he said. But beyond his desire for FX to develop more documentary-style, unscripted shows, Mr. Landgraf said, he specifically took on the sticky, unarticulated subject of race.

"There is a lot less overt bigotry in America," Mr. Landgraf said, so he wanted to find a way to probe the more subtle side of racial conflict. "What you find is that there is still a misunderstanding of the different histories and life experiences of blacks and whites."

The three executive producers — the documentarian R. J. Cutler (the television series "30 Days," "The War Room"); the actor and rapper Ice Cube, who starred in and produced the films "Barbershop" and "Barbershop 2: Back in Business"; and Matt Alvarez, a partner at Ice Cube's company CubeVision Productions — said they simply sought to capture reality. The families, they said, did not receive any instructions. In public settings the cameras were either hidden or were present under the pretext of making a documentary about a family. Mr. Cutler said that race is "the central defining issue in American society, American history, where we are now, where we're going, and it's something that doesn't get spoken about."

Ice Cube, who sings the series's theme song ("Please don't believe the hype/ Everything in the world ain't black and white"), said the show would give people a reason to talk about race at work the next day. "And hopefully, in discussing the show, learn a lot more about each other and maybe deal with some of the issues," he said in an interview.

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 bigger issues like discrimination in housing or employment. The adults, in particular, said they walked away feeling misunderstood by the other couple and frustrated by the 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,' " Mr. Marcotulli 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, though, said they believed that Mr. 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, like changing their speech patterns.

While the two teenagers did not engage in the same verbal skirmishes as the adults, Ms. 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 Ms. 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.

But Nick Sparks, now a 17-year-old student, does not buy into notions of outsize cultural gaps between the races. "In our generation, we don't see race," he said. "I was treated about the same when I was black and white."

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, Mr. Cutler said.

"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."