Larry Clark s Kids with big name stars and a director conflicted about what can and cannot be shown on screen. The shock value is lost. That is exactly what Black and White is, an honest look at the streets of New York City that has little effect on the viewer.
Little kids look on as their presumably virgin-eyes are corrupted.
From there on, everything is downhill. The language used in Black and White is, in a way, very revealing. A classroom scene shows that the teenagers teachers care. Yet their vocabularies are a dense version of broken English perhaps most similar to Ebonics. In the aforementioned class, kids swear and no one flinches.