Experiment in race makes an odd reality

“Black.White.,” which debuts tonight on FX, is a kind of “Race Swap” or “Temporary Extreme Makeover,” in which -- via the kind of makeup magic that made possible the movie “White Chicks” and Billy Crystal’s imitation of Sammy Davis Jr. -- a white family of three becomes “black” and a black family of three becomes “white,” in order to ... well, in order to exactly what is the question. Everyone seems to be there for a different reason.

As a social experiment, the six-part series (four hours of which were made available for review) is unscientific at best, just another vivid expression of the principle that the act of observing changes the thing observed. (Especially when there are big cameras around.) It also expresses what should be fantastically obvious -- admittedly, not obvious to everyone in the show, so they may have a point that the world is not colorblind, and that in 2006 America, it’s (generally speaking) harder work to be black than it is to be white.

The experiment itself is not entirely novel, having been most famously undertaken by writer John Howard Griffin, who in the late ‘50s had his skin chemically darkened and went undercover in the Jim Crow Deep South. “Black Like Me” is the book he wrote about it, and it got him hanged in effigy in his Texas hometown.

Griffin’s book had its own fictional precursor in Laura Hobson’s “Gentleman’s Agreement,” which became Elia Kazan’s Oscar-winning 1947 movie, about a reporter pretending to be Jewish to experience anti-Semitism.

As Greg Braxton reported in The Times, the producers -- R.J. Cutler, of “The War Room,” and Ice Cube are the series’ white and black creators -- have been accused from a number of directions of nudging, or fudging, the truth. Certain situations were prearranged, though that’s not made clear in the show, and material was edited for dramatic effect rather than strict journalistic balance. But this is true, of course, of all reality television, and to some extent even of the most scrupulous documentary film. Producers ought to have to add a warning when they haven’t tried to manipulate material.

Still, in this year of “Crash,” there appears to a desire to examine these issues, and whatever its faults, I can’t think of another series that makes race such a central issue, and worries it so doggedly.

Inevitably, however, it works best at its most intimate, as family drama, and as another variant on “The Real World,” in which people who would not ordinarily live together are made to do so: Here, the Sparks family of Atlanta (the black family) and the Wurgels of Santa Monica -- actually two Wurgels and a Marcotulli -- bunked together for six weeks in a house in Tarzana.

The families rub against up each other in ways good and bad, but also deal with their own issues. The Sparkses are concerned that their slacker son Nick open his eyes to the world and to history, while teenage Rose Wurgel has to deal with mother Carmen’s freaky intensity -- which often lands her foot in her mouth -- and Carmen’s amazingly insensitive boyfriend, Bruno Marcotulli.

Bruno is the series’ Santino, the sort of awful creature you can’t quite believe and so can’t stop watching. As portrayed here, at least, he’s an opinionated know-it-all, obsessed with his vision of black family dynamics and with convincing his new roommates that racism is a state of (their) mind. “I’m trying to enlighten you to the fact that you’ve got to approach life in a certain way and not expect you’re being mistreated because you’re black,” he tells Brian with all the authority of a few days walking around in makeup.

There is an inherent imbalance to their experiences. Whereas the Sparks family wants to see what it’s like to be, as it were, color-neutral, the Wurgels (save Rose, who is the picture of sensitivity, sincerity and proportion) are looking for a kind of cultural kick that, at times, seems not so different from Park Avenue swells going up to Harlem in the ‘20s.

And some of the planned activities play weirdly into stereotypes: While Rose is put in a slam poetry group, Nick is signed up for etiquette class -- which, as Rose points out, “is not just a white kid thing -- it’s a rich white kid thing.”

Ultimately, however, all come up against the fact that a costume isn’t an identity. “You can’t act black,” Rose says. The same goes for everyone, whatever color or thing you aren’t, or are.

*

‘Black.White.’

Where: FX

When: 10 to 11 tonight

Ratings: TV-14-L (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17, with advisory for coarse language)