Ice Cube is a well-known legend when it comes to music and film, but what many didn’t know was that in 2006 he produced a TV show where contestants swapped races.
Leave it to Twitter to discover anything and everything you may not have known existed. On Saturday (April 9), a TV show that didn’t have much popularity on-air suddenly became the talk of social media.
The reality show — titled “Black. White.” — aired on FX and featured families switching races for six weeks. On the show, the contestants would get full-on makeovers complete with airbrush body paint that would transform Black people into white and vice versa.
The idea of swapping lives isn’t completely foreign. TV shows such as ABC’s “Wife Swap” have done similar experiments for years. At one point, there was even a celebrity spin-off version. With Cube’s show, though, Twitter users didn’t seem to be thrilled about the idea of “black face” being used in a reality series.
According to IMDb, the show’s theme song was “Race Card” by Ice Cube. A description of the show reads, “What’s it like to walk not just in another man’s shoes, but in another man’s skin? That’s the question this series asks as it transforms through extensive makeup work a black family into a white family and vice versa. The two families live together for the duration of the experiment, discussing their experiences — sometimes heatedly — after the makeup comes off.”
After the six weeks were up, the contestants washed away their borrowed DNA and transformed back to their birth race. The series showed the families discussing the situations they experienced while living in a different race’s shoes.
For anyone interested in viewing this social experiment, old clips can be found on YouTube. For now, though, here’s what Twitter is saying about the show.