More than 40 years before we elected a black president – who is himself the product of an interracial marriage – Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn tackled the then-tricky topic in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. During a famous scene, Tracy ’s character says about the prospect of his white daughter marrying a black doctor:

“Anybody could make a case, a hell of a good case, against your getting married. The arguments are so obvious that nobody has to make them. But you're two wonderful people who happened to fall in love and happened to have a pigmentation problem.”

“A pigmentation problem” was a polite – practically genteel – way of acknowledging that interracial marriage was, in 1967, the ultimate taboo topic. At the time of the film’s release, interracial marriage was still illegal in 17 states. The movie’s exploration of the hot-button issue was considered provocative and controversial, and earned the film 10 Oscar nominations and two wins.

Like “Oleanna,” David Mamet’s incendiary response to the Clarence Thomas hearings, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was a wickedly current, ripped-from-the-headlines reflection of the country’s changing social mores and its polarizing views on race. The very year it debuted, Loving v. Virginia would rule that race-based legal restrictions on marriage were unconstitutional. And just a few months after it debuted, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, and a casual reference to him was removed from the film for the duration of its run in theaters. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’s tagline, “A love story of today,” was truly appropriate.

In 1991, the Will Smith vehicle “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air,” tackled interracial marriage in its own unique way with an episode titled “Guess Who’s Coming To Marry?” where the family is shocked to learn that a black aunt is engaged to a white man.

And in 2005, a loose remake of the Sidney Poitier movie called Guess Who, starring the late Bernie Mac and Ashton Kutcher, also flipped the story around in a light-hearted examination of interracial marriage through the lens of black skepticism, not white. In the new millennium, after all, white skepticism is racist. But black skepticism is hilarious.

In short, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner didn’t just spawn myriad cultural derivatives. It prompted an ongoing discussion about race that spanned decades – indeed, almost half a century.

The latest iteration of the film classic debuted a couple Sundays ago to little notice on TLC, the infuriatingly addictive cable network that has produced some of reality television’s most compelling series, from “Jon & Kate Plus 8” to “Little People, Big World” to “LA Ink.”

Their new hour-long special is called “Guess Who’s Coming Over,” and is, according to their press release, “a social experiment that brings two lives with different experiences together under one roof.” In what serves as the pilot episode of a potential running series, “Viewers travel along with Chuck, an African American from New York City , as he moves in with the white family of David Turner, a self-described ‘redneck’ in Dawsonville , GA. ”

At the outset, we come upon a camouflaged Turner and his son shooting at glass jars in their yard, which looks predictably more like a pickup truck graveyard than a residence. David thinks that all blacks “like fried chicken and watermelon,” listen to rap music, and live in the ghetto. He likes to spin out his cars on the dirt driveway when he’s not shooting at deer in the woods or fetching logs with his Caterpillar backhoe loader. He is right out of central casting.

And Chuck is a black comedian from New York City, good-natured and open-minded, who gently and politely teaches the Turners that black people aren’t that bad after all.

On first blush, the premise appears to be something like this: Martian black man is dropped on planet Deliverance, and local humans prod suspicious alien with pitchforks.

If it sounds like something out of 1967, well, it is -- and it isn’t. The very suggestion that a black man and a white man would have to be “introduced” to one another via “social experiment” is more than a little outdated, as are some of David’s views. He doesn’t believe in “the mixing of races,” and doesn’t even want to participate in a hypothetical discussion about his daughter marrying a black man.

When I described the premise to Dr. Marc Lamont Hill, an urban studies professor at Temple University and a Democratic strategist, he said, "This show sounds like an excuse to wallow in the same one-dimensional and stereotypical racial spectacles that have undermined healthy racial dialogue in our nation for decades."

But at the same time, it’s an evergreen and endearing story about two people from different places, learning about one another. David later accompanies Chuck to New York City , but not after shedding a few tears at the thought of leaving his wife and kids for a few days. He is overwhelmed by Times Square , and saddened when he seems to have an easier time hailing a taxi than Chuck does.

The producers of the series could have chosen a “David” and a “Chuck” that were more explosive if they wanted, but they didn’t.

“It’s TLC,” said Dustin Smith, the network’s director of publicity. “We’re not trying to make fun, or put people in awkward situations to boost ratings. That is not the mission of this network.” The goal was to explore a social issue with candor, respect, and a little humor. While it isn’t a searing docudrama, it is, like everything else on TLC, a learning experience. “I think mostly it explores ignorance,” said Smith. “And by ignorance, I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. I simply mean ‘not knowing.’”

“Guess Who’s Coming Over” won’t be the last pop culture project to examine race. But it does raise an interesting question. This is 2009 – wasn’t all this supposed to go the way of the dinosaurs? The United States has a black president, after all – a black president who, for many, signaled the dawn of an exciting new era called “post-race America .”

The media seems to have been the biggest backer of this sociological phenomenon, and was quick to pontificate on just what it meant to elect a black president. The media’s visible shock (and awe) at the monumental event a seeming contradiction to their matter-of-fact declaration that racism is definitively over. Continued...