It takes more than makeup
I have not seen this show yet, but I will be watching it tonight. If you already saw the first episode, please tell us what you thought.
In the meantime, LaShawn gives her 2 cents, and TruthDig gives the real scoop behind this show. Here is an excerpt of their article:
By Sheerly Avni
“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.â€Â
Not only do these situations feel forced, they often actually are forced: Even Rose’s class, for example, where she agonizes about whether to come clean with the young poets about her fake identity, is a setup. The kids there are all black, to push the whole racial divide thing, but in reality, spoken-word workshops are usually as diverse and multicultural as Los Angeles claims to be. Poetri and Juren Smith, the husband-and-wife team running the workshop, told the Los Angeles Times that he, Poetri, was asked to put together an all-black group to fit the needs of the show, and that he knew Rose’s secret the whole time.
It’s a bit self-defeating, especially since the whole point about racial (and ethnic) tensions is that daily life provides more than enough to work with. But the two families’ daily lives are what’s missing, since the whole situation is contrived from the start: You never see them argue (or agree) on what television show to watch, what food to cook, whose turn it is to take out the garbage, or who drives the car. We’re watching “reality,†sure, but it’s one in which all the conflict is orchestrated around artificial circumstances, far removed from the real-life interactions that both fuel racial tension and ultimately serve as our only means to combat it.”
Ice Cube should have known better than to get mixed up with this. I’ll add my two cents to this post after I have seen tonight’s episode.
I agree that the way the show is setup lends itself to contrived and forced “encounters.” I would’ve made some pretty drastic changes to how the show was produced.
I have an interesting perspective of what I thought the show would be like, before I saw it. But after viewing it this weekend, I feel that the show/experiement would have been better served to show each family member in an identical situation when they are in “White face” and in “Black face.” Only then, would EVERYONE be able to assess how different things are… if indeed they are different. The way the show is now, you can’t really tell if race really matters.
Comment by plez... | March 15, 2006
I saw the show and watched them on Oprah. I do wish it would have been more like the book Black like me. They would have been made up and left to live life without the step up situations. I do find some of the things interesting. Such as when the black father (made white) asked the guy in the bar what the neighborhood was like. I wonder what type of response he would have gotten had he not had on the make up. Also the when he went to buy shoes and the sales man touched his foot and put the shoe on him. I would have loved for him to go back to the same salesman as a black man to see if he would have gotten t e same treatment.
Comment by Saudia | March 15, 2006
“Also the when he went to buy shoes and the sales mantouched his foot and put the shoe on him. I would have loved for him to go back to the same salesman as a black man to see if he would have gotten t e same treatment”
I live in Va and hsve white folks touch my feet all the time.
Comment by Eugene Fisher | March 15, 2006
I have at least 100 pairs of shoes. I shop at low end and high end retailors. I have never had my foot touched by a sales person.
Comment by Saudia | March 15, 2006
I was put off by this thing at first because it is so stilted and fake a concept, and the white people just do not look “black” to me (though the latest makeup techniques are much better than in the past. At least the white dad doesn’t look like Al Jolson!). Boy has he got a lot to learn, by the way. But, as has been said here, the whole thing is a setup not unlike Survivor and Big Brother. I’m ashamed of Ice Cube because he is a very successful guy who got where he did on his talent, persistency, and savvy. Why then fake things like the all-black (NOT) poetry workshop? It doesn’t show what would really happen. Of course some white guy in a bar is going to get into that redline crap. But are all whites like that when they don’t think a black person is looking? That is what we must believe from this show. I missed last night. I hope it is on again so I can see if it still sounds as bogus as it did the first time.
Comment by Ned | March 16, 2006