Black and White Families Trade Places on TV

Jan. 17, 2006 — -- Imagine living your entire life as a white person, then suddenly becoming black. Imagine growing up black and then suddenly living life as a white person. A new show on F/X called "Black.White" tries to answer the question: What is it like to live in another person's skin?

Produced by rapper and actor Ice Cube and R.J. Cutler, who produced "American High" and "The War Room," the show is a social experiment on the Sparkses, a black family from Atlanta, and the Warguls, a white family from Santa Monica, Calif. The Warguls have a 17-year-old daughter, Rose, and the Sparkses have a 17-year-old son, Nick.

Keith VanderLaan, who did the makeup for "The Passion of the Christ," "Mrs. Doubtfire" and "Mamma's House," heads the show's makeup team. To be transformed, each person had to sit in the chair for as many as five hours, and it took two hours to take the makeup off. Cutler said, by and large, people could not tell that the families were wearing makeup. It was an arduous process -- but worth it to prove that race is still a significant issue in the United States.

"I think race is the central defining issue in America today," Cutler said. "It's the foundation of everything. But what's amazing is that it doesn't get talked about that often and, yes, we're always being asked, 'Won't it upset people?' That's not the idea. The idea is to make people talk."

Trading races was a significant transformation, but the show's producers took the process even further. They had the two families live together during the six-week project.

The Sparkses took the transformed Warguls to church. Similarly, Brian Sparks, the black father, underwent his transformation to take a bartending job at a white bar. There, he heard the barroom ruminations of white men, who spoke their minds freely, sometimes with shocking racism. Rose Wargul, the white daughter, attended a poetry slam in makeup and shared some of her writing. She eventually confessed her true identity to the black teenage poets.