The Real World's Kevin and Becky relive their 30-year-old argument about race in exclusive preview

In the three decades since the first season of The Real World aired, a lot has changed in America. But a lot also has not.

Case in point: race relations. The cast is still engaging in heated conversations about the topic in the Paramount+ reunion series, The Real World Homecoming: New York, and in an exclusive preview of this week's episode, Kevin and Becky open old wounds on an argument that played out between them in a July 1992 episode, which resulted in Kevin calling Becky racist.

"When it's heated emotions," Becky says in the clip, below, referring to their previous argument, "people become defensive and it's hard for them to listen to the other person."

"You're speaking for yourself as being defensive. Is that what you're saying?" Kevin asks, interrupting, to which she agrees before he adds that he "wasn't being defensive." While she insists that he was "emotional" in trying to express his point of view, he stops her to point out the implications of labeling Black people as angry and emotional.

"Some of the most famous conversations on race and racism in American TV history were literally on our first season of the show, and it opened up a lot of dialogue," Powell — who also had a famous fight with castmate Julie about race — recently told EW, when asked about how accurate he thinks he was portrayed on the original series. "People literally have come up to me… black folks, white folks, all kinds of folks [and say], 'I never thought about racism until I watched that show.' I was like, Wow! Or they would say to me, 'You said, Racism is race plus power' — I didn't remember that I said that, but I guess I did, and I saw it [in clips from the show]. That's what people have quoted back to me. So it was incredible, and for it to kind of foreshadow a lot of stuff like Black Lives Matter, it's important to me."

You can see how the rest of the conversation plays out between Kevin and Becky on Thursday's episode of The Real World Homecoming: New York, streaming on Paramount+.

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