New Jersey

Turbans Make Targets, Some Sikhs Find

To appeal to a wider audience, Whitesell has ingeniously pitched Big Momma's House 2 as mind-numbing comedy, pregnant with redundantly inappropriate and awkward quips and gags. However, Big Momma House 2's purportedly feather-light farce grapples with many a complex and politically-charged question regarding the role racial minority cross-dressing plays in contemporary American culture.

Martin Lawrence's dual identity as an ambitious young sharp-shooting National Security agent, driven by his unremitting patriotism to go incognito as an elderly corpulent female, provokes comparisons between his two radically different personae. In doing so, it raises an interesting question: how does our society corner successful young black men into performing absurd self-caricatures in order to be embraced by mainstream culture?

By challenging us to laugh at our own violent and repressive racial and sexual stereotyping, Big Momma's House 2 instigates important cultural conversations regarding America's deep-rooted societal prejudices: have these bigotries really evolved since the Civil Rights Movement, or have they just been transformed and made less recognizable?

The film suggests that if we can allow ourselves to reflect openly and honestly upon these questions and anxieties, instead of displacing them onto a grossly caricatured 250+ pound African-American woman, perhaps we can also preclude the culmination of a Big Momma's House trilogy.

Kozol, Jonathan. . Savage inequalities : children in America's schools / Jonathan Kozol. [051758221X : ] New York : Crown Pub., 1991.
Call#: Van Pelt Library LC4091 .K69 1991

Inequality and racism still exist. They impact children. Check this out especially if you are considering Teach for America. 

Lichtenstein traces a history of the Southern antebellum labor economy, focusing on its convict labor penal system. Lichtenstein cites LeRoy's film specifically, arguing that the film (and Burns’s autobiography) position southern chain gangs against modernity. However, chain gangs represented the South’s attempt to participate in northern economic industrialism. Chain gangs developed roads and infrastructures, enriching the south’s economy and expanding its participation in American culture and accelerated networks of communication. Thus, Lichtenstein "joins a growing number of studies that reject the dichotomy between a modern and antimodern South, and instead seek to link the region’s most appalling features to the process of modernization itself” (xvi). Chain gangs facilitated the South's response to economic and cultural pressures posed by the nation's dominant industries. Thus, the financial corruption and penal brutality which the chain gangs made conspicuous to the nation represent the South’s efforts to progress and to modernize. 

If mounting Depression social anxieties also threatened Hollywood's cultural and economic dominance in 1932, then Warner Brothers' total vilification of the chain gangs, which it depicts as embodying a barbaric and regressive South, suggests a financial motivation for the studio's misreading of the Southern penal system. Of course, markets incentives motivated every aspect of Hollywood production, from Warner Brothers’ propagandization of Chain Gang as a uniquely subversive film – to lure audiences who tended to shy away from overtly political films in 1932 – to the studios’ collusion with FDR to circumvent antitrust proceedings. However, Lichtenstein’s situation of the film within a more complex modernity dialogue puts pressure on conservative Jack Warner’s selection of this story as a vehicle for conveying to the nation his studio’s radical politics. By denying technology and modern industry’s implication in a variety of problems associated with Great Depression society, WB propagandized commercial cinema as a revolutionary alternative to sites of purported cultural backwardness which are in reality much more complex than a Hollywood film reveals.