In “White Chicks,” the id swap works in comparable vogue with the added twist of a gender swap. When Kevin and Marcus turn out to be Brittany and Tiffany, they’re given the privileges of white femininity. In an early scene, set within the Hamptons, a concierge asks for a bank card to carry the room. Kevin and Marcus, caught with their very own debit playing cards, threaten to throw a “bitch match” if the resort doesn’t enable them to check-in. After a tantrum, they’re allowed of their rooms.
In addition they pull the curtain, displaying how white individuals would possibly act when Black individuals aren’t current: When a music by the rapper 50 Cent comes on the automotive radio, as an illustration, a trio of white girls are aghast when Kevin and Marcus beneath white make-up use a racial slur within the lyrics. “So? No one’s round,” says Kevin. Armed with permission, the entire white girls freely shout out the slur. In her essay “Surviving in Residing Colour With Some White Chicks,” the movie scholar Beretta E. Smith-Shomade keenly provides the title of informant to the Wayans brothers, who conceived of the movie’s story. Their infiltration of white areas grant a window to how whiteness operates unseen. In “White Chicks” we hear different white observers derisively name Kevin and Marcus the “Wilt Chamberlain sisters.” We hear one white girl surprise aloud if somebody is “Martha Stewart broke or MC Hammer broke.”
Within the Wayanses’ roles as informants, nevertheless, their best weapon is Crews as Spencer. Prototypically in racial passing narratives, white persons are duped whereas Black individuals see proper by the subterfuge. The intense artifice of the brokers’ garish prosthetics, due to this fact, is a characteristic not a bug. When you would possibly anticipate white individuals to be fooled by the horrible theatrics, it’s telling that Spencer can’t inform the distinction. He unreservedly pursues Marcus as Tiffany, to whom he refers as his white bunny, as a result of she is his supreme girl: She has white pores and skin, however by her break dancing, her curvier rear and tenacious perspective, has Black attributes.
Spencer’s personal insecurities, exemplified by Crews’s unimaginable mixture of slapstick physique comedy and sight gags, turn out to be a catalyst for unmooring stereotypes about Black masculinity and race. Finally, he’s pursuing a Black man, destabilizing his personal assumptions about what defines manhood and whiteness. By Spencer coveting white femininity, to the purpose of memorizing “A Thousand Miles” so he would possibly show his suitability, he additionally mirrors how individuals of shade, by the media’s illustration of race, are programmed to covet whiteness too.