If you live long enough, eventually someone you know will become a star of reality television. And it just happened to me.

Meet Bruno Marcotulli. He and I attended Hollywood High School together in the mid-1970s. I was the nerd without a clique. He was the affable varsity basketball star who was accessible to dorks like myself as well as the cool kids, if memory serves. Bruno and I were slightly less than friends but more than acquaintances. The truth is, in the intervening three decades since high school, I haven't spent 10 minutes wondering what had become of the guy.

But as I plopped in a review copy of the new FX reality series "Black. White." that premieres Wednesday at 10 p.m., there was Bruno, wearing black makeup, but unmistakably Bruno.

Bruno is a substitute public school teacher now who lives in Santa Monica with his girlfriend and her 18-year-old daughter, all three of whom star in "Black. White." along with a three-member family from Atlanta who was transformed via make-up into Caucasians to serve the show's social experiment conceit.

I wanted to chat with Bruno not simply to catch up and see if he remembered me after 30 years (he did) but primarily to uncover how it is that this affable and guileless dude had overnight become a poster child for racism -- a charge implied by no less than the NAACP and leveled directly by Brian Sparks, the husband-father of the black family with whom he shared living space for five weeks last summer.

"Can you believe that?" he asked during a phone chat late last week. "I feel like I'm being persecuted for being honest and not toeing the politically correct line. Here I am, an advocate for nourishing the minds of young African-Americans as a teacher, and I'm branded as being the problem. It's pretty ironic."

In truth, Marcotulli may have brought on much of the heat himself. His take in the show, from which he never wavers, is that racism is often more myth than reality, manufactured by those looking for prejudice and discrimination around every corner. He also demonstrates that his darkened skin affords him a certain cart blanche to utter the N-word repeatedly.

Yet in the context of the show, it plays more like naivete than bigotry. No matter. Poor Bruno has spent his 15 minutes in the klieg-light glare defending himself for his opinion that White America doesn't necessarily have it out for the black community and that he "doesn't buy it" that Caucasians routinely cross the street to avoid strolling past individuals of color.

"I'm not saying that I know what African-Americans go through on a daily basis, and I'm not stupid; I know racism exists," Marcotulli stresses. "I just don't believe it's as pervasive as we're routinely led to believe. And I think discrimination can be something you bring on yourself."

This view naturally did not endear him to the black family on "Black. White." We see them expending a lot of hostile energy in an exasperated attempt to enlighten Bruno and his girlfriend Carmen, whom they found utterly clueless. The way the series plays, it's difficult not to agree this is indeed the case.

"I apologize for none of my opinions," he says, "but it's also true that the producers tended to cut out any instance where I had more sympathy and compassion because it didn't fit my character arc. They needed a villain, so anything that deviated from that had to be dropped. This is a TV show. I get it."

But didn't it make him angry to be cast as such a heavy?

"I am what I am," Bruno concludes, "and I refuse to apologize for telling the truth."