In “White Chicks,” the identity switch works in similar fashion with the added twist of a gender swap. When Kevin and Marcus become Brittany and Tiffany, they’re given the privileges of white femininity. In an early scene, set in the Hamptons, a concierge asks for a credit card to hold the room. Kevin and Marcus, stuck with their own debit cards, threaten to throw a “bitch fit” if the hotel doesn’t allow them to check-in. After a tantrum, they’re allowed in their rooms.
They also pull the curtain, showing how white people might act when Black people aren’t present: When a song by the rapper 50 Cent comes on the car radio, for instance, a trio of white women are aghast when Kevin and Marcus under white makeup use a racial slur in the lyrics. “So? Nobody’s around,” says Kevin. Armed with permission, all of the white women freely shout out the slur. In her essay “Surviving in Living Color With Some White Chicks,” the film scholar Beretta E. Smith-Shomade keenly gives the title of informant to the Wayans brothers, who conceived of the film’s story. Their infiltration of white spaces grant a window to how whiteness operates unseen. In “White Chicks” we hear other white observers derisively call Kevin and Marcus the “Wilt Chamberlain sisters.” We hear one white woman wonder aloud if someone is “Martha Stewart broke or MC Hammer broke.”
In the Wayanses’ roles as informants, however, their greatest weapon is Crews as Spencer. Prototypically in racial passing narratives, white people are duped while Black people see right through the subterfuge. The extreme artifice of the agents’ garish prosthetics, therefore, is a feature not a bug. While you might expect white people to be fooled by the terrible theatrics, it’s telling that Spencer can’t tell the difference. He unreservedly pursues Marcus as Tiffany, to whom he refers as his white bunny, because she is his ideal woman: She has white skin, but through her break dancing, her curvier rear and tenacious attitude, has Black attributes.
Spencer’s own insecurities, exemplified through Crews’s incredible mix of slapstick body comedy and sight gags, become a catalyst for unmooring stereotypes about Black masculinity and race. Ultimately, he is pursuing a Black man, destabilizing his own assumptions about what defines manhood and whiteness. By Spencer coveting white femininity, to the point of memorizing “A Thousand Miles” so he might prove his suitability, he also mirrors how people of color, through the media’s representation of race, are programmed to covet whiteness too.
