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Hollywood spreads the fictions of whiteness around the world. - Hernan Vera and Andrew M. Gordon
As long as race is something only applied to non-white peoples, as long as white people are not racially seen and named, they/we function as a human norm. Other people are raced, we are just people.
- Richard Dyer
Introduction
In this paper, using insights from critical race theory and critical whiteness studies, we argue that the movie White Chicks, while certainly a comedy, takes seriously the critical capacity of the black gaze to tease out the subtieties of whiteness. We argue that White Chicks, directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans and written by Keenen Ivory Wayans, Shawn Wayans, and Marlon Wayans (the latter two playing the main characters) has the power to produce "the shock of being seen" (Sartre 115). On this score, the Wayans brothers resist the hegemony of the white gaze through filmic agency. Not only through enacting and performing whiteness, but through the mimicry of predominant racist images of the black body, the Wayans brothers are able to create an effective space of opposition and critique. Even the tide of the film, White Chicks, engages in a process of nomination that frames and clearly delineates its theme of interrogation. Due to space limitations, the themes that we explore constitute only a select few of the many important themes generated within this filmic text. One underlying premise that informs our scholarship in this paper is that White Chicks constitutes an important popular cultural site that speaks to complex suent assumptions that inform the American imaginary around issues of race.
While we are critical of the class and essentialist presuppositions that inform the expression "urban black behavior," it is our position that the Wayans brothers enact, and indeed exaggerate various stereotypical forms of black behavior in order to interrogate the white imaginary. This does not mean, however, that the Wayans brothers buy into a thin, non-compUcated understanding of "blackness." In fact, the Wayans brothers complicate the stereotypes precisely through their filmic exaggerations. Such exaggerations function as a subtext that speaks to the Wayans brothers' sense of self-reflexivity regarding white myths vis-à-vis the black body. And while the white imaginary is no doubt inflected by class and other nonracial...