Jeff Gerber has it all—a wife and two kids, a home in the suburbs, and a great job. But he’s also a loud-mouthed racist who wakes up one morning to discover he’s turned into a Black man. Suddenly, Gerber has to deal with a shocked family, cold shoulders at the office, and a back seat on the bus.

Inspired by Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Melvin Van Peebles’s only studio vehicle critiques Hollywood’s facile representations of race with hilarity and subversiveness. By dismantling the lily-white aesthetics of the family sitcom, Watermelon Man exposes the hypocrisies of American liberalism.