gender play? race play?

So, I'm just sitting here trying to write my essay and I came upon a thought that I found quite intriguing...
If we accept gender play as acceptable, what about race play? Butler, in discussing parody, writes, “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency” (Butler 1990, 187). It plays upon the anatomy of the performer and the gender that is being performed. What would happen if we applied this to racial categories? Would it be less acceptable? In an interview Eddie Griffin said, “I think a lot of confusion came from the [difference] between ‘nigger’ and ‘nigga’…Let me elaborate… ‘Nigger,’ if you look it up in the dictionary, is a retarded, ignorant mother fucker. ‘Nigga’ is a term of endearment that brothers use amongst ourselves” (Eddie Griffin, 2004). Does this quote assume that race play is less acceptable than gender play? And how should we regard the theatrical performance of “blackface,” which began around the 1830s? How does this relate to drag? These are difficult questions to answer, questions that are attached to emotional histories.
It seems that though performative choice is in fact limited to what is appropriate and acceptable. Where do we draw the lines? If we cannot perform any identity we want to, what does our anatomy have to do with that which we perform? Butler seems to be arguing that our anatomy should not have anything to do with how we perform our identities—but the scrawny little white kid, no matter how endearing his motives, might get himself killed referring to his African American homies as “nigga.”


what do you think? worth pursuing?