Movie "Who's There"

Guess Who. Dir. Kevin Rodney Sullivan. Perf. Ashton Kutcher, Bernie Mac. Videocassette. Sony, 2005.

In the movie Guess Who, a black woman brings home her boyfriend, a white male played by Ashton Kutcher, to meet her parents. Her father is played by Bernie Mac, who does not approve of his daughter being with a white man. One night over a family dinner, the subject of black jokes is brought up and Bernie Mac taunts Ashton Kutcher into telling a few. The family finds his first few funny but then Ashton tells this joke.

Ashton Kutcher: What are three things that a black man can't get?


Bernie Mac: What is that he can't he get?


Ashton Kutcher: A black eye, a fat lip, and a job.

A complete transcript for the movie can be found at: http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/g/guess-who-script-transcript.html

There is silence at the table until Bernie Mac’s character yells at Ashton and leaves the table.

The movie Guess Who is full of black and white stereotypes that are brought to the surface when an interracial couple goes home to tell family they are getting married. This movie is a wonderful example of the racial thoughts and boundaries that still exist in our society today.

In Johnson’s chapter “Getting Off the Hook: Denial and Resistance,” he mentions several ways that people who receive privileges and in turn cause others to be oppressed, try to get out of taking responsibility. One of his ways of getting off the hook is when people tell themselves, “It doesn’t count if you don’t mean it”(114). In the movie “Who’s There,” Ashton Kutcher’s character is telling black jokes to his girlfriend’s black family to be humorous. The first couple he tells are light-hearted and the family laughs with him. However, his joke about black people not being able to get a job offended them, especially his girlfriend’s father, even though he did not mean it to be offensive. Johnson says in his chapter, “’I didn’t man it’ can stop a conversation before people get to the reality that it doesn’t matter whether it was meant or not. The consequence remains the same”(114). Although Ashton did not intend to upset his girlfriend’s family, he did because the joke was offensive. He did not come up with the joke himself and he did not think the joke was a truth but it still has the same consequences to the black family as if he had meant the joke to be offensive. By anyone finding humor in such a joke and passing it on to their friends, the joke lives on and whatever its original message was lives on as well. In this case, the jokes original message was that someone honestly thought black people could not get jobs. By allowing to joke to be retold time after time, the message is retold as well. Even if people only see it as a joke when they hear it or mean it as a joke when they tell it, they are still keeping alive the idea that black people are inferior when it comes to the workplace. It says they cannot get good work or hold a good job and makes them sound lazy. This may not be the intent of anyone who tells the joke but as Johnson said, that does not change the consequences it can have.

I agree with Johnson’s idea of intent and consequences in this case. People may not mean something, such as a racist joke, to be offensive, but it still has negative consequences. Because the joke is a black joke, it singles out blacks as a race, putting them in a separate social category and furthering progress of equality. It also may be humorous to say with other white people around but most would not say a black joke to another black person because they know the black person might be offended. If it is not appropriate to say to them and might offend them if they heard it, it is not all right to say just because they are out of earshot. The offensiveness is still there whether a black person heard it and felt offended directly or not.