I remember the first time I saw the movie "White Chicks" (2004). It was a reasonably priced $5 matinee on the Saturday following my 12th birthday.
"Lemme get one ticket to 'White Chicks' please?" I said to the only employee in sight. "Kid, you know it's rated PG-13 right?" he responded. I stepped away from the ticket booth, smiled wryly, stood tall and placed both hands behind my back, hoping for the best. He leaned toward me to speak again: "So ... are you 13?" I paused for what seemed like an eternity before finally muttering, "Um ... yes?" Clearly sensing the fib, the employee shook his head, shrugged a shoulder and gave me a ticket! "White Chicks" turned out to be hilarious.
I've always had an insatiable desire to laugh at blatantly offensive, insensitive, politically incorrect comedy. That Saturday afternoon, I hooted and hollered in the theater until my sides hurt. I, along with a handful of other entertained moviegoers of all races, thoroughly enjoyed the antics of the undercover African-American FBI agents dressed in whiteface drag. I laughed then, and quite frankly, I still laugh today. But at what cost?
By laughing at "White Chicks," I'm essentially condoning the use whiteface, implicitly claiming that it's a culturally acceptable practice. Yet on the other hand, I cringe whenever I see blackface in any way, shape or form, even in somewhat harmless contexts, such as in the case of Laurence Olivier's blackened visage in the four-time Oscar-nominated film, "Othello" (1965). Looking back, I should have realized that I was being hypocritical in failing to see that "White Chicks" is reverse racism at its finest. But then again, maybe it's not. Not if reverse racism doesn't exist all. Could that be possible?
In a standup routine that went viral in an Internet second, comedian AamerRahman makes the claim that reverse racism simply doesn't work.
"I [could] be a reverse racist if I wanted to," he said. "All I would need would be a time machine ... and I'd go back in time to before Europe colonized the world ... and I'd convince the leaders of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Central and South America to invade and colonize Europe ... [I'd] set up some kind of, I don't know, trans-Asian slave trade ... [I'd] just ruin Europe ... I'd make sure I set up systems that privilege black and brown people at every conceivable social, political and economic opportunity ... If, after hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years of that, I got on stage at a comedy show and said, 'Hey what's the deal with white people?' ... that would be reverse racism."
Rahman is closer to right than wrong in making this well-stated claim that reverse racism isn't a legitimate thing. Considering the way in which he chooses to define racism, his point could very well be true. After all, there's certainty something to be said about the reality in which we live: if the movie had been called, say, "Black Chicks" and it starred white comedic actors, there would be a national outcry, to say the least. In other words, the historical implications of race-shaming tactics such as blackface cannot be ignored. Still, the phrase "reverse racism" doesn't need to have to be a bona fide dictionary definition in order for us to realize that it's still not okay to legitimize a film that involves black actors sporting white masks for the purposes of entertainment. It's wrong. And we all know that.
But at the end of the day, most of us will still laugh at "White Chicks," and we will still laugh when Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock do their classic mockeries of white voices. In doing so, we not only approve one type of racism, but also participate in the resulting perpetuation of racism against minorities.
Nash Simpson is a senior majoring in English. He can be reached at Nash.Simpson@tufts.edu.
