'HIGH SCHOOL REUNION' BACK WITH MORE DRAMA

Shalonda Warren Clark Deals With The 'Buckwheat' Incident.


By Kenya M Yarbrough
(March 4, 2009)

The second season of the TV Land original series “High School Reunion,” airing tonight at 10/9c, has created some explosive new memories for 19 classmates from the 1988 graduating class of Arizona’s Chandler High School and particularly for Shalonda Warren Clark. But although the Florida mom had to face off on the show, she has no real regrets about participating in the reality show.

“I’ve just been coming back to work and doing my regular 9 to 5. It might be nice to see if I can spin it into something else. Who knows?,” Clark said about extending her 15 minutes of fame. “It has been such a roller coaster ride. I think I would do it again because the people that I got to connect with as adults, I talk to them everyday, and it’s great.”

It wasn’t all great for Clark during the taping, however. In its second season, “High School Reunion,” moves a group of former classmates to Hawaii to live together in one house for two weeks for their 20th reunion celebration. This time around, the cast is a bit more diversified, and that racial mix-up became an unpleasant happenstance at the Hawaii homestead.

In what has become known as “The Buckwheat Incident,” Clark the only African American woman of the group, confronts a white former high school mate, Dennis “The Menace,” in front of the entire cast after he repeatedly refers to her as "Buckwheat."

“That was something that I was not prepared for. I was prepared to go and talk about being a teenage mom and things like that and having dealt with racism throughout my life, it was really surprising for me to go there and have somebody be so ignorant to a person’s feelings. That was shocking. I was stunned.”

Clark told EUR’s Lee Bailey that she had to take a moment during the confrontation just to calm herself. After all, this would be over and she’d have to return to her husband, her teenage daughter, and her job.
“I thought he did not know how offensive he was and then I began to think, ‘No, he does know how offensive he is and he’s deliberately being this offensive.’ He repeated his behavior; he repeated it because he didn’t get the response that he’d anticipated. He wanted something and he kept doing it until he got it,” she said.

“I think he was encouraged to say it, but I don’t think they knew just what an imbecile he was and how far he would go, nor do I think they knew how offended I would be by it,” she explained. “I think they thought it would be good TV. There were retakes. This was not one of them.”

Clark admitted that she figured there would be some type of drama in the house – after all, it is reality television, but she said that she never thought she would be one of the ones in the middle of it.

“I just did not anticipate that it would be – that. I did not anticipate that I, personally, would be involved in a hostile situation like that,” she said.

One thing that may have surprised her more was the reaction from the only other African American cast member, Tyrone “The All-Star,” who apparently defended the comments.

“I was disappointed. I did expect Tyrone to identify with it; that perhaps he had some experiences like that,” Clark said, “but when I spoke to Tyrone; his experiences were primarily football and sports. I said, ‘Tyrone, you do realize you had a football pass. These people that accepted you, accepted football players, but they didn’t necessarily accept black people. They tolerated you because you were good athletically.’ So it was disheartening. I was disappointed, but I had to understand that we had different black experiences.”

TV Land fans can experience the rest of this story tonight on the cable channel. For more info, full episodes, and cast blogs, visit www.tvland.com/originals/highschoolreunion/.