Dear White People

So long as Amer­i­can white peo­ple tip­toe around appro­pri­at­ing black peo­ple swag­ger, and blacks grit their teeth at insen­si­tive microag­gres­sions, so will the grav­i­ty of an unequal soci­ety be under­mined by an impli­ca­tion that the black expe­ri­ence is a min­strel­sy sideshow. And so will there be an audi­ence want­i­ng a release valve in the form of a movie like Dear White Peo­ple, which set off an Indiegogo firestorm with its blithe, point­ed con­cept trail­er. ​“Dear white peo­ple,” its radio DJ announced, ​“the min­i­mum require­ment of black friends now need­ed to not seem racist has just been raised to two.” ​“Dear white peo­ple – stop pet­ting my hair.”

The crowd­fund­ing cam­paign for writer/​director Justin Simien’s debut hung its hat on those con­fronta­tion­al procla­ma­tions, hint­ing at a glee­ful col­lege-cam­pus satire fling­ing pies in com­pla­cent­ly priv­i­leged faces. The film, how­ev­er, is more del­i­cate­ly low­er-key, and shares with Spike Lee’s School Daze a desire to inves­ti­gate con­tra­dic­tions and dif­fi­cul­ties in craft­ing and nav­i­gat­ing one’s iden­ti­ty as an ambi­tious black youth. Saman­tha (Tes­sa Thomp­son), the DJ and film stu­dent who promis­es to ​“put the black back,” faces accu­sa­tions of over­com­pen­sat­ing for her mixed-race back­ground. Her stu­dent pol­i­tics rival Troy (Bell) feels pres­sure to con­form to aspi­rant groom­ing, and makes taint­ed deals with white fra­ter­ni­ties, while liv­ing a secret life of sneak­ing to the bath­room to ​“smoke weed and write jokes.”

Scrapes are cov­ered in the col­lege news­pa­per by Lionel (Tyler James Williams), a gay, nerdy, put-upon scribe whose desire not to be pigeon­holed makes him seem dubi­ous­ly unal­lied. Coco (Tey­on­ah Par­ris) is the glam, straight-hair mir­ror of Sam’s Afro rev­o­lu­tion­ary – instead of resist­ing, her image flu­id­ly con­forms to get ahead, whether flirt­ing with rants to gain YouTube hits or turn­ing a blind eye to racism to go with the estab­lish­ment flow.

Dear White Peo­ple begins with a redis­trict­ing plan that’s designed to break up a black hous­ing block and builds to a cli­max in which the snot­ty white fra­ter­ni­ty throws a shock­ing black­face par­ty, yet it still doesn’t feel like a movie that holds whites to account. Rather it’s a bit­ter­sweet reflec­tion on the self-immo­lat­ing iden­ti­ty crises black peo­ple go through when up against a cul­ture that patro­n­is­es them – how their pub­lic per­sonas are strate­gies, how they pri­vate­ly have mixed-race affairs, how they code-switch.

On the plus side, that makes Dear White Peo­ple a com­e­dy explic­it about the top­ic of race, pep­pered with casu­al asides like, ​“Don’t wor­ry, the negro at the door isn’t going to rape you.” If it’s less focused than the right­eous sketch humour of Hol­ly­wood Shuf­fle, it is still wit­ty, and Simien’s visu­al style is smooth and acces­si­ble, with a warm mahogany grade and a grace to the struc­ture of chap­ter inter­ti­tles and tableaux vivants.

Yet, this is a col­lege film that eschews intel­lec­tu­al or his­tor­i­cal ref­er­enc­ing for spoon-feed­ing, alter­nat­ing from sharp cracks to tooth­less, soft-edged slop like, ​“You’re more Banksy than Barack.” And after Fer­gu­son, Tamir Rice, the Eric Gar­ner ver­dict, and so much oth­er recent inten­si­fi­ca­tion in the cli­mate of Amer­i­can race rela­tions, the slick rel­a­tivism about blacks’ own role in the machin­ery of black stereo­typ­ing feels not quite a vital enough note to rise to the title.