By Donald H. Harrison

You've heard the old saying about "If you could walk a mile in my shoes," and now on television, a new reality series, Black, White, is exploring what happens when people actualize that.  But instead of "shoes," two families are walking inside each other's skins.  

Rose Bloomfield, 18, from Santa Monica, California,  her mother, Carmen Wurgel, and stepfather Bruno Marcotulli "trade races" with the Sparks family, who are African-Americans from Atlanta, Georgia.  The Sparks' family (Brian, Renee and their 17-year-old son Nick) are similarly gutsy, passing themselves off as Caucasians.  

To live in each other's skins, members of both families have to undergo lengthy daily sessions with expert make-up artists, who provide them with wigs and skin tinting.  The families live together in the same house, in Tarzana, California, in order to coach each other how to be "black" or "white."   It is clear that the whites need far more coaching.

I don't know it for a fact, but I assume that the Wurgel-Marcotulli family comes from mixed cultural-religious backgrounds, Carmen and Rose probably being Jewish, and Marcotulli, Italian-Catholic.  If so,  they may have previous experiences to call upon as this show unfolds, but thus far that theme has remained unexplored.

There will be five more episodes of the show, which made its debut on the FX network last night.  One suspects that relations between Bruno, who is almost truculent in trying to prove that African-Americans exaggerate white racism, and Brian, who has suffered from it his entire life, will grow increasingly tense.  

In the first episode, we saw the families undergo the makeup sessions, watched their reactions as they encountered themselves and each other racially transformed, heard a little bit about their expectations,  watched the families begin to interact, and witnessed three fascinating segments in which Rose had to pass herself off as a budding  black poet, Brian worked as a bartender in a white community, and Renee, participating in a white focus group on race, hears one man confess hat while he is ashamed of himself, he  nervously wipes off his hand after shaking the hand of a black person.

Were it not for Rose, I think I might have had little hope for this experiment.  Unlike her mother and stepfather, she appeared to be approaching the experiment with complete commitment—unwedded to preconceptions, liberal or otherwise.  She is quiet, observing, and when called upon to read her poetry, does her best, admitting that she is scared. Although her poetry sounds different from the others,  she immediately wins sympathy from the rest of the poetry group who—except for the facilitators—do not know that she is in actuality Caucasian. Rose's true desire to fit in, to learn as much as possible from this experience, makes her very endearing.

Brian, on his first day as a bartender, inquires about places to live, and is told by one of the patrons that the community in the vicinity of the bar is a white enclave, a "safe" place to raise children. He is shocked by what the patron tells him because such information is something he never would hear as an African-American. So, this is it, he figures, this  must be the way whites really feel about blacks.  A visit to a shoe store provides another insight.  It is the first time that a white clerk actually helps him try on the shoes, instead of handing them to him to try on himself. 

No doubt, future episodes will provide greater focus on Renee, Nick, and Carmen, but in Episode One  they make less of an impression. One suspects that members of the two families will continue to say things to each other that will make viewers cringe but that, in the end, they will achieve friendship and understanding for having gone through a unique experience together. 

They will learn a lot about each other, revise some of their conceptions, and perhaps influence their audience to do likewise.  This is daring television that can teach society about itself.   FX deserves our appreciation and viewership.