Wigger, Please!

[April 23rd, 2003] When Al Jolson donned blackface for the first talking motion picture, 1927's The Jazz Singer, he was furthering an already well-established tradition--white people making money by pretending to be black.

Seventy-six years later, white people no longer slather on burnt cork to blacken their faces, but they're still making money by pretending to be black. Case in point: comedian Jamie Kennedy's film Malibu's Most Wanted.

Kennedy stars as Brad Gluckman, the silver-spoon son of a gubernatorial hopeful (Ryan O'Neal). Fancying himself a great MC, Brad changes his name to B-Rad and adopts the clothing, language and mannerisms of the rappers he sees on BET. In other words, he embraces the aesthetic of ignorant thugs. Of course, this concerns B-Rad's father and his campaign staff, so they devise a ludicrous plan involving two actors pretending to be thugs (Anthony Anderson and Taye Diggs), who will kidnap the clueless wigger, take him on a tour of the 'hood, and scare the black out of him.

Malibu's Most Wanted plays out like a cross between Jolson's The Jazz Singer, C. Thomas Howell's Soul Man, and Eminem's 8 Mile, all served up with a lethal dose of stooopid pills. Kennedy emerges as the blackface minstrel man of the new millennium, sans the blackface. And although his character is not as obvious as performers like Jolson, it is no less insidious.

The fact of the matter is there have always been white people who have been attracted to, and have attempted to emulate, that which is most commonly identified with "being black." That's not to say that every white person who plays jazz or rocks the mic is a culture vulture or a wigger, just as not every black person who lives in the suburbs and speaks "proper" English is an Uncle Tom. But visit any suburban shopping mall in America, and you're guaranteed to find white teenagers acting and dressing just like what the media tells them black people are like. For centuries, both the people of African descent and their culture have been bought and sold. The commercial exploitation of black culture results in a nullification of the culture itself and turns it into a commodity.

Perhaps all of this is reading too much into a silly comedy about a rich white kid who acts like he's black. But Malibu's Most Wanted does address the fact that there are white people who try hard to emulate a very myopic notion of blackness. And there's a lot that can be said about people who aspire to be something that espouses the more negative aspects of another culture--and none of it is positive.

To the film's credit, Malibu's Most Wanted does valiantly attempt to address the concept of racial identity and stereotypes. And, in its own bizarre way, it has more to say about these topics than such high-minded films as Spike Lee's Bamboozled. But the problem is that the whole thing is too damn stupid to have much merit or be remotely effective. The result is a commentary on race that's as useful and well-conceived as fighting a five-alarm fire with a thimbleful of water.