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| Tessa Thompson stirs the pot in Dear White People. |
««« Dear
White People. Written and directed by Justin Simien. At selected theaters.
Depending on where you stand, we Americans either don't talk enough
about racism, or we never stop talking about it. There's no shortage
of solemn calls to "have a national conversation about race." But
when conservation does start, it too often devolves into lecturing, hectoring,
shaming—everything but listening.
Many blacks justly see whites as oblivious to the enormous challenges of their
lives, subject to a system of institutions and attitudes that preserve white
privilege. Many whites, demographically downsized and economically squeezed,
laugh at the notion of being "privileged" in a society where the only
truly advantaged color is green.
Justin Simien's Dear
White People won't solve any of this. It does manage to do the next best
thing, though: to enact real conversation about race, instead of just
overlapping monologs. It is largely for this reason that it was one of the big
hits at the Sundance festival last year.
It's important to acknowledge first what Simien's movie isn't. It isn't a "Spike Lee
joint" like Do the Right Thing
(1989) or Lee's black college movie School
Daze (1988). Both of those films covered similar territory, but along with
the politics Lee showed great affection (or nostalgia) for the deep heritage of
black culture. Simien has little of Lee's visual flair, and none of his
brotherly sentimentality; his "black community" as really just a
collection of individuals, each with bitterly conflicting agendas. Dear White People isn't laugh-out-loud
funny. It is sharp, though, with moments of dialog that snap and cut like
icicles. In short, where Lee made poetry, Simien is more of a prose satirist.
His script concerns the simmering racial scene at fictional
"Winchester University". Biracial student Sam White (Tessa Thompson) runs
a campus radio show called "Dear White People", where she knowingly
stirs the pot of racial anxieties in the college's white majority. ("Dear
white people—it is no longer OK to call us 'African-Americans'," she
announces. "If you're afraid just saying the word 'black' will make you
seem racist, then you probably are racist.") Among her peers are Coco
(Teyonah Parris), an ambitious blogger with a reactionary bent, Troy (Brandon
P. Bell), scion of the school's first African-American dean, and Lionel (Tyler
James Williams), a writer and gay man whose social alienation is
equal-opportunity. Simien sets his characters in motion in and around the staging
of a campus Halloween party that supposedly celebrates "the end of
racism" by inviting white partygoers to don black-face, act gangsta, and
quaff "purple drank" (an event Simien based on real occurrences at
various, mostly-white colleges).
To say Sam, Troy et al. object to all this is both to state
the obvious and do it no justice, because it's just about the only thing they
agree on. Simien's complex, conflicted souls, black and white, give him scope
to air the anxieties of both sides. Stereotyping and lumping—respectively the
bread and butter of prejudice—are hard to sustain when Simien insists on
treating his characters with such tender specificity. Here, race colors
everything, but can never be separated from issues of power, privilege, and
personality. And nobody is just a victim.
It's become a truism to say that race is a "cultural
construction". Indeed, it is often declared as if mere awareness of this
fact will set us all free. But people have deep cognitive need of their
"constructions". It's hard to say what will eventually replace the
defining power of skin color in a post-racial America—but Simien has gone the
farthest so far in exploring the possibilities. It will be interesting to see
where he goes next.
©
2014 Nicholas Nicastro
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