This is actually a reasonably clever idea for a movie: Seth Rogen and Kevin Hart are apparently going to star in a movie in which they play the first interracial buddy cops. Now, it’s not like Hollywood is new to being self-aware about the trope. 21 Jump Street has Ice Cube, with the double wink that N.W.A. is on the movie’s soundtrack, and a less subtextual scene where he explains that he’s a cop and sometimes he gets angry:

The Other Guys contrasted a pair of black super-cops with a pair of white schlubs who rose to the occasion:

But treating the anthropology of that particular joke as the basis for an entire movie could work well, and not simply as a one-off joke. We treat this kind of schtick as if it’s immutable, as if it comes from someplace real rather than a commercial urge to appeal to as many demographic groups as possible. We might as well have fake history to go with our fake rules.