Dear White People, Dear white people, don’t dance.” That’s one of the pieces of unasked-for advice delivered by Sam White, student at Ivy League establishment Winchester University, whose radio show “Dear White People” helps to keep the campus racial tensions simmering. Another? “Dear white people, the minimum requirement of black friends needed to not seem racist has just been raised to two. Sorry, but your weed man, Tyrone, does not count.”
Sam’s show gives Dear White People, the debut feature from writer/director Justin Simien, its title and her calm but ferociously judgmental voice speaks loudest, clearest and longest. But just as Dear White People seems to be a valentine to Sam (Veronica Mars’s Tessa Thompson) and her withering dismissal of the black students she sees as tap-dancing for white approval and the white students clownishly adopting hip hop diction, Simien reveals his heroine’s biracial parentage and clandestine affair with a sensitive white teaching assistant.
Sam’s far from the only student struggling with her identity in Winchester, a hall of learning whose president proudly proclaims “Racism is a thing of the past”. Coco (Mad Men’s Teyonah Parris) has erased any association to her impoverished past in Chicago, but when a shot at reality TV fame comes with the stipulation that only hood rats need apply, she’s forced to revert to the persona she detests.
Troy (Brandon Bell), on the surface the obedient, overachieving son of the school’s Dean (Dennis Haysbert) dates the adoring daughter of Winchester’s president. This is mainly so he can curry favour with her brother Kurt (Kyle Gallner, another Veronica Mars vet) who runs the schools’ humour magazine, Pastiche - which is, it’s claimed, a direct route to the writing staff of Saturday Night Live.
And then there’s Lionel Higgins, (Tyler Christopher Williams from Everybody Hates Chris), a socially awkward gay black nerd with a gargantuan Afro and a fondness for Mumford & Sons and Robert Altman movies. The mumbling, downward-gazing Lionel is ostracised by every subsection of Winchester’s diverse student body. In a campus where black students are confused about how black they want to be and white students act like caricatures from rap videos, no one wants to be like him. But it’s the meek passive Lionel, rather than the firebrand Sam who takes a stand when Kurt’s frat house throws a blackface party, complete with watermelons, gold chains and fried chicken (an event, the closing credits show, that takes place with depressing regularity in the modern-day campus).
Dear White People arrives at an interesting time in the relationship between race and pop culture. Sam White gives voice to many an elegantly-constructed tirade about the stereotypical range of black images portrayed in movies and on TV, about how white audiences are the dominant consumer of the worst of those images (“Who is the biggest consumer of hip hop? Who watches the Real Housewives of Atlanta?”) and about the Christian dogma peddled by Tyler Perry. But the world moves fast.
ABC has built its entire Thursday night network on the sturdy shoulders of Shonda Rhimes and, by extension, Kerry Washington and Viola Davis. The same network’s race-obsessed family comedy Black-ish is the season’s biggest new sitcom hit. The departing Colbert Report is to be replaced by Larry Wilmore’s Minority Report. It’s progress.
On the other hand, the biggest rap song of the year is by an blonde Australian woman who sincerely and emotionally defends her artistic decision to utter every syllable of every rhyme in the accent of a black Southern female. Undeniable signs of post-racial confusion on a level unseen at Winchester university.
