And while all of that was a lazy and sleazy thing to do, it wasn’t as problematic as the show’s central thesis. Look, it is possible to get some understanding about what it’s like to be a member of a different race, but you 100% don’t need to and shouldn’t paint yourself another color to do it because that might give you a false sense of getting access to some deeper knowledge or something. In reality, the most you can get out of that is a personal perspective that might not be universal or even kind of common for people of a particular ethnicity. More importantly, any race change will teach you absolutely jack squat if it’s temporary.
Bizarrely, the (deservedly) widely-panned 1986 comedy Soul Man about a white kid (C. Thomas Howell) pretending to be African-American to get a law school scholarship somehow understood that perfectly. By the end of the film, a professor asks the main character if he learned something about being black, and he straight-up admits that he didn’t because he ALWAYS had a chance to go back and be white.
Actual Black folks can’t (and I’m guessing don’t want to) do that. Unsurprisingly, Black. White. lasted for a grand total of six episodes, and the most it accomplished is maybe possibly proving that the white Santa Monica dad was kind of racist. That’s hundreds of thousands of dollars well spent.
Follow Cezary on Twitter.
Top Image: FX
Related: Netflix Apparently Didn’t Realize It Was Peddling Blackface
Join the Cracked Movie Club
Expand your movie and TV brain–get the weekly Cracked Movie Club newsletter!
Recommended For Your Pleasure
'Black. White.': Ice Cube's Reality Show That Won An Emmy (For Blackface)
Source: Pinoy Daily News
![Disclaimer](<a href="https://rebrand.ly/LazadaSalePh"><img src="http://getfreefollowers.net/images/lazhorizontal.jpeg" /></a>){kind=link}
0 Comments