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Howard Student Helps White Girl Be "Black"

By Joy Young
Black College Wire

Photo credit: FX On "Black, White," Rose Bloomfield changes races. Howard student DeVaughn Harris coached her.

Howard University student DeVaughn Harris appears on the new reality TV series, "Black, White," produced by rapper-turned-actor Ice Cube and R.J. Cutler, documentarian turned reality show producer.

The show hopes to promote discussion of race in a social experiment in which makeup makes a black family white and a white family black. It airs on the FX network on Wednesdays, and debuted March 8.

The sophomore speech communications major and aspiring TV producer was a member of a poetry class in which the show's white-girl-turned-black, Rose Bloomfield, 18, was enrolled.

Harris recalled that the first time he met Rose, he assumed she was a black girl who had been around white people most of her life.

"I signed up for a poetry class at a poetry spot in L.A. called Da Poetry Lounge. . . . We were told from the start that we weren't meant to be major figures in the show. We were just basically getting to take a $400 poetry class for free and get our faces seen on TV. They only told us that a girl who was new to the area was also in the class and the show was meant to document her. And after meeting her, it never crossed my mind that she was white or that Hollywood had the skills to change someone's skin color. It wasn't 'til later in the class that we all discovered she was white."

Later, producers asked Harris to help Rose learn about the black experience. Harris sat in on meetings and added his ideas to the production, and even got some behind the scenes experience.

"Outside of being a student in the poetry class, I was hired as an employee with Actual Reality," one of the production companies, "to work for the remainder of the show. I was able to sit in the office to help with brainstorming ideas for activities that the families would do to make for a better experience. I also shadowed one of the producers and was exposed to the filming, editing process and makeup procedures. They let me actually work with the cameras and film a little. I spent some time at the end of the day editing with them."

Even though working on the show made for extremely long days and even longer nights, Harris would not trade his experience for anything.

"Most days I'd start with them around 10 or 11 in the morning and wouldn't leave till 1 or 2 the next morning. I loved my experience. . . . I felt privileged. I was basically picked to represent black people and try to get a young white girl to understand what it was like to be black. I did my best to show her our culture and not the stereotypes."

In addition, he said, "A handful of black people got an opportunity to dispel some of the stereotypes they had of whites. Because oftentimes, we as blacks only look at the world from our perspective, [so] we're unable to truly appreciate white people. Just as not every black person is the same, not every white person is the same. They are as complex as we are. And we at the Mecca have historically fought racism, and there is no reason why the legacy shouldn't be more prominent."

Joy Young, a student at Howard University, writes for the Hilltop.

Posted March 8, 2006