Whiteboyz
May 11, 2007
I was surprised to hear that Whiteboyz was really a movie about class. As I watched whiteboys I couldnt help but think that they reminded me the white boys I went to private school with. The boys and my school definately made the same claims that their white skin color was a birthmark adn that their real skin color was that tiny dot on their forearm. Now these kids came from rich families so im even more confused if the movie was mainly about race or class..
May 11, 2007 at 7:26 pm
A movie about class? Yeah, I wouldn’t have thought so either, except to the extent to which race is tied up with class. But anyway, I’m not sure what it means to say a movie is “about” something. Like we said in class, once a movie or book is published, it’s out of the author’s hands and any claim about what the movie is “about” is valid as long as you have good evidence to support that view. Maybe the director meant Whiteboyz to be about class, and maybe a lot of reviewers think it’s about class, but it’s (to some extent at least) in the eye of the beholder.
May 12, 2007 at 2:00 pm
Vincent is right. I cannot begin to separate class from race, or even gender for that matter in this country. In Whiteboyz, however, the movie begs the question, which one dominates. I think it is a chicken and egg type question personally. These particular “whiteboyz” saw a certain type of lifestyle being lived by certain people and that they wanted that lifestyle and the luxuries as well: cars, alcohol, drugs, women, houses, and more cars. Antoher important aspect about the lifestyle they say is that is was depicted as easy, both achieving the success and the money. And they wanted it. So, what better way—in this country—is it to get all these things than entering the business of rap music which just happens to be predominately black artists? TV does not tell you about the struggles of most rappers, especially those who never make it. VH1, MTV, and the news channels highlights 50 Cent, Snoop Dogg, the Game, and other rappers and portrays them as having “quick starts” and fast lives. In essence, TV does not give the stories of these rappers; they simply give the final product as if it happened overnight. People fall in love with these fictional lifestyles that is portrayed in the tabloids and video shows. Also, no one looks behind the characters. He may be 50 Cent on the records, but he is Curtis Jackson when sitting in the board room.
Vincent is also correct to bring up the fact that once something is produced, those who produce are no longer in control of it. They may have intended it to do one thing, but it is received differently. And as Silverman showed us, society’s (the receiver’s) perception wins. That is why I think that this movie could have been about class. It just got conflated with race, just like everything else in this country.
May 16, 2007 at 6:40 pm
These white boys may have reminded you of your former classmates, Shantel, but these “white boyz” were far from rich and, ironically, have more in common with the culture they were exploiting than they knew. Unfortunately, the “boyz” expressed their frustration and angst through gansta rap– the sub genre of hip hop which is more of a “report” (debatable yes I know…i don’t really support this 100% but thats a story for another blog entry…) of their situations in poverty and violence rather than an “expression” of what’s inside of them.
-Oh poor hip-hop….[sigh]
May 18, 2007 at 3:26 am
I could definitely see how Whiteboyz was about class. The working-class, check-to-check, struggling kind of life is what makes these Midwestern white characters feel as if they can relate to the ghetto life that rappers describe. The problem is that the white boys assume that poverty, the thug image, jail, drugs, and hip hop are the end-all & be-all of what it means to be black. That’s why they never imagined that Khalid’s house would be so much flyer than theirs, nor did they doubt for a second that he would have “contacts” back in Chicago. When Khalid freaks out about starting college classes, or stresses out about getting arrested, none of his white friends even understand why those things concern him. That stuff just doesn’t fit into the stereotype of what interests young black men.
One of the most interesting interactions between the black and white characters in this movie is the moment in which the whites say “nigga” in Khalid’s presence. Whether it’s directed to him or simply said around him, he’s not tryin’ to hear it, especially not from some corny wannabe rappers.
The white guys “sincerely” say nigga as a term of endearment and solidarity, but their true (racial) allegiances are revealed at the end of the day. When J Dogg loses his temper with Khalid, he calls him a nigger…clearly not in the brotherly way. If they believed that they were “down” enough to relate to black people, they would have had the good sense not to call a black man a nigger in a moment of anger. These white boys are only “down” relative to the folks around them. They’re actually pretty out of touch when it comes to what blackness means. Too bad they don’t find that out ’til the end that they hardly know anything about what they claim to “represent”…