Black. White. Episode 1
Posted in General, Politics by George
A recent guest article was posted on gimme-five recently about the new television show “Black. White.” The premise of the show is that makeup artists turn a white family into a black family and a black family into a white family and they go off and see how they are treated in everyday situations. I had not seen the show at the time the guest article came out, but I recently was able to watch the first episode.
My first thought was that they did an excellent job disgusing the black family as white. I was incredibly impressed by all of the makeup work. I was not impressed at all, on the other hand, with the makeup work on the white family as black. Bruno, the alpha male of the white family, looks like he accidentally fell asleep in a tanning salon for about six hours. He looks awful. His wife is marginally better but still really fake looking. Their daughter looks the most realistic in that family.
In terms of personalities, they are all rather interesting. The black family members are all pretty chill, with the exception of the dad, Brian who seems to have a bit of a chip on his shoulder. The white family, on the other hand, seems like they have never encountered anyone of a different race. Bruno, the dad, refuses to admit that racism exists and doesn’t seem to realize that the “n-word” does indeed, make many black people angry. He continually says it, and with good reason, Brian gets angry with him. Furthermore, Bruno won’t stop hounding Brian about how he’s just “looking for racism” which obviously pisses him off even more.
Anyways, it seems like they pulled these families based on their likelihood of getting in a fight with each other because that’s definitely the way things seem to be turning out.
That’s all for now… I will write again about this show when I see more…
April 2nd, 2006 at 8:50 pm
I suppose I should write something controversial so people will start to comment again :(
April 7th, 2006 at 9:47 am
A hostile black dad and a clueless white family you say? Gosh that sounds like a recipe for drama and hijinx. Surely the folk producing this show are out to educate Americans and draw them into the discussion of race and class differences.
Saw the Colbert Report the other day. They had Jesse Jackson on. Sez Stephen Colbert, “So Mr. jackson, what you going to be doing now that race relations are no longer a problem in America?”
On a totaly unrelated note, MSNBC has another inflamatory story furthering this trend of racial grandstanding.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12154123/
Reports offer grim forecast for young black men
New studies find them falling further out of labor force, mainstream society
At a time when the U.S. economy is on the upswing and more people are finding work, young African American men are falling further behind.
That’s the grim portrait painted by three new and forthcoming books by scholars at Columbia, Georgetown and Princeton universities. The picture isn’t new, but the depths of its despair and pathology are.
This vexing problem, caused by a variety of social ills, is equally vexing when scholars consider what causes it.
Among the studies’ findings:
* Rates of imprisonment for young black men escalated throughout the 1990s and continued climbing well into the current decade. About 16 percent of black men in their twenties who were not college students were either in jail or in prison.
* African Americans are seven times more likely to go to prison or jail than whites.
* Almost 60 percent of black male high school dropouts in their early thirties have spent time in prison.
* The percentage of young jobless black men continues to increase, part of a trend that generally hasn’t abated in decades. In 2000, about 65 percent of black male high-school dropouts had no jobs, either because they couldn’t find work or because they were in jail. By 2004, the studies found that number had grown to 72 percent. The numbers for young black men were higher than for whites and Hispanics similarly affected.
Making matters worse, a forthcoming book, which includes a study of nearly 1,500 private employers in New York City, found that black job applicants with no criminal records weren’t any more likely to get a job than white applicants who were just out of prison.
April 7th, 2006 at 6:45 pm
Shaniqua - good find on the MSNBC article. When this site began, I was pretty oblivious (being a senior in high school) and basically took the stand that racism didn’t exist and that we didn’t need any form of affirmative action. I have since tempered my stand to a degree, but I definitely find that in the job market, in particular, there are some serious race differences. Interesting article though with the statistic at the end.
April 10th, 2006 at 10:34 pm
“In 2000, about 65 percent of black male high-school dropouts had no jobs, either because they couldn’t find work or because they were in jail.”
How do you think an unskilled black guy thinks of the “new civil rights” movement of illegal immigration?
Areas in LA that were black majority areas have been taken over by Hispanics. Blacks don’t like that much. And this hasn’t been really given that much attention in the discussion on immigration.
Some whites are racist and it is sad that blacks have to deal with that. But many inner city blacks are going to have more problems dealing with conflicts with Hispanics than white racism. But this is often overlooked.
April 10th, 2006 at 11:46 pm
I guess this is an interesting idea, although I don’t know very much about it. I wonder if there will be much racism between blacks and hispanics that will fall in the country’s spotlight.
April 11th, 2006 at 12:39 am
“In this era of mass immigration, no group has benefited less or been harmed more than the African American population,” said Vernon M. Briggs Jr., a Cornell University labor economist who has studied the effect of immigration on blacks for more than three decades.
In a 2004 book, “The Impact of Immigration on African Americans,” Briggs and other scholars charted myriad effects, including lower wages for less skilled and less educated blacks and their substantial displacement from the job market, with many dropping out of the labor pool entirely. In education, they found that providing remedial resources for immigrant students cut into resources for native-born students and that immigrants modestly displaced blacks from affirmative action programs.
In Los Angeles, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission recently obtained consent decrees for damages on behalf of black job applicants who filed discrimination complaints against the Clougherty Packing Co.’s Farmer John processing plant, a subsidiary of Hormel Foods Corp., and Zenith Insurance Co. after alleging that Latino supervisors at both firms failed to hire them.
The Farmer John supervisor, for instance, passed over blacks with meatpacking experience in favor of Latinos, who made up the entire workforce of about 1,000 employees, according to Anna Park, a lawyer in the Los Angeles regional office of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The firm has agreed to pay $110,000 in damages to seven black plaintiffs and to set up training and monitoring programs.
The bottomline: Blacks with skills and education do better when more unskilled immigrants come in, but those who have low skills and who are US citizens are hurt by the influx of more low skilled labor.
Fremont High was mostly black school until recently. Now it is mostly Hispanic.
There was a riot there in March
http://www.nbc4.tv/education/8184060/detail.html?r...
There were three mini-riots with blacks and Hispanics fighting each other at Jefferson High School last year.
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-...
There was a series of brawls between blacks and Latinos in the California prison and jail system this year.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-02-04-pri...
April 12th, 2006 at 4:27 pm
So what’s the next FOX show? Asian and Black? Black and Hispanic? Oh, the amusing cultural conflicts and opportunities to sell Ambien and Levitra.
One way for the diminishing white demographic to deal with the fact that they’re becoming a minority is to set the classically defined minorities against each other and to balkanize the landscape. Fragment and divide. The wasps need to play the role of cultural steward and standard protectors.
It’s not whitey keepin ya down; it’s the asians and hispanics. Whitey’s on youse side….
Speaking of riots, you know, I’d watch a real-world prison drama if FOX had it on because they’d only show the high drama content. The shivings. The romance. The soap on a string.
Of course, being a woman pro wrestler, I’d prefer some caged white heat drama, but that’s just my druthers.
April 12th, 2006 at 4:40 pm
You know what show needs to come back… celebrity boxing! Or another episode of man versus beast…