If we're going to make a romantic comedy whose message can be "black people have biases too," couldn't we at least make it in the direction of Something New:
I don't at all object to folks making movies about racial bias, particularly when it comes to love, across the spectrum of color, and I don't at all object to those movies being funny. I'd really like to see a good one about African-Americans and Jews. But there are a couple of reasons the trailer for Our Family Wedding makes me ill, and that I really liked Something New.
1. The whole "saintly kids, biased parents thing" was smart in Guess Who's Coming To Dinner. It's tired now. It's not that I don't think generational differences exist around interracial dating, but Dr. and Mrs. John Wade Prentice's beautiful interracial children are all grown up and having romantic difficulties of their own now. Times have changed. Having someone's Mexican grandma faint when her daughter brings home a black man wouldn't have been subtle in 1967, and it's not subtle now. It's much more interesting to me to see main characters dealing with race in their own love lives--and frankly, more honest--than to pretend everybody is colorblind these days and it's just the Olds who object. In Something New, the main character certainly is pressured by everyone from her parents to her friends to date a black man instead of a white one, but her reaction is much more complicated than simply throwing off their objections. She has issues of her own. She's not a saint. And therefore, she is interesting.
2. The humor has to be good. There are "the goat is eating my Viagra" jokes. Then there's Donald Faison, after being told by Sanaa Lathan that she should be polite to her white landscaper, declaring "It's the help." The former requires a substantial setup, and a kind of depressing payoff, in the form of said goat humping Forest Whitaker. The second is three words, the joke's all in the inflection, and it's a pretty cutting commentary on class attitudes as well.
3. If Our Family Wedding is going to confine the class politics to the fact that Carlos Mencia runs a towing company and Whitaker owns a nice car, I will be deeply depressed. I think that the best movies about bias frequently acknowledge that in any situation where there are biases, there are multiple power imbalances in play. In Something New, it's not just that Lathan's dating a white guy, she's dating a white, blue-collar guy. Class prejudice gets wrapped up as something defensible, and something to fall back on instead of racism: where you went to college or what you make treated like a reasonable standard of compatibility, something to use as an excuse not to see someone whose race or faith you're not comfortable with instead.
In other words, like all movies, flicks about interracial love affairs should be good, rather than bad. It's just that the misses here can be so painful, and so glaring.