Hard to believe but there is actually some reality programming that network suits are too shook to air.

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cravefix.com/filmtv/display_post.php
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There Goes The Neighborhood

ABC abruptly cancelled a six-episode reality series called Welcome to the Neighborhood last week after protests from all sides felt the early episodes of the series sent the wrong message. The show, sharing more in common with the NIMBY phrase "there goes the neighborhood," pitted white homeowners against a "Rainbow Coalition" of prospective new neighbors to occupy a house on their block in Austin, Texas.

The show chronicled the community's racial and social unease with "a Hispanic family; an Asian family; two gay white men who've adopted a black boy; a couple covered in tattoos and piercings; a couple who met at the woman's initiation as a witch; and a white family where mom is a stripper."

The National Fair Housing Alliance and Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation expressed outrage at the show, purportedly using racial tensions for kicks. But perhaps they doth protest too much. According to producers, the show's six-episode arc actually showed the transition of the white block from purveyors of stereotypical anxieties about the contestants to accepting individuals. The NFHA spokeperson said people of color and others shouldn't have to be humiliated to teach white people a lesson about tolerance, but is that really what was going on here?

Without having seen the show we can only speculate, but it sounds to me like the butt of the joke was on the suburban whiteys, who openly put their prejudices out there on television for all to see. There was a time when being openly racist or prejudice was out of fashion -- oh yes we all remember the 90s -- but then 9/11 happened and the neocons took over, making gay bashing popular again and ethnic distrust merely prudent national security policy. What this really tells us is that America has never been as tolerant or enlightened as some of us growing up watching Star Trek thought it was. But here was a show that by all rights, may very well have helped ridicule the kind of prejudices freely exhibited by the Austin neighors and emblematic of so many neighborhood blocks from coast to coast.
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