Movie Review: Dear White People (2014)

 

Racism. Present Tense.

One of the iconic scenes of director Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing points the camera at five disgruntled characters, each rattling off a string of epithets against his hated demographic of choice. Pino, the vocally racist son of an Italian-American pizzeria owner, is the one to offer his stream of black stereotypes. The camera closes in on Pino, zooming in from wide to uncomfortably close. He glares into our eyes, leans over a greasy food counter, and spits:

“You gold-teeth-gold-chain-wearin’, fried-chicken-and-biscuit-eatin’, monkey, ape, baboon, big thighed, fast-runnin’, high-jumpin’, spear-chuckin’, three-hundred-sixy-degree-basketball-dunkin’, tutsun spade Moulan Yan.”

Director Justin Simien brings Pino’s vilification to life in Dear White People’s climactic arc, in the form of a college Halloween party that beckons its patrons to release their “inner negro”. In a relentless series of medium and wide shots, the camera scours through a menacingly foggy room, lit with shards of neon light and filled with white undergraduate students. They wear ochred plastic grills on their teeth, pump their fists in the air to the sound of heavy hip hop backbeats, and sip alcohol out of pimp goblets. Surrounded by grease-stained buckets of fried chicken, the men are draped in oversized basketball jerseys while the women have stuffed excessive amounts of padding down the backside of their pants.

Their white faces are painted black.

Simien’s feature film debut brings audiences to the campus of a fictional Ivy League school to ask one important question: what it does it mean to be “a black face in a very white place”?1

The answer, according to the clever, punchy collegiate satire, demands us to think before touching a black guy’s afro— and before claiming we live in post-racial America.

Dear White People follows the struggles of four black students at Winchester University, a predominantly white campus rife with racial tension. You have Samantha White (Tessa Thompson), a Media Arts major, who is ready to drop an “ideological piano” on anyone who does not subscribe to her Black Power inspired convictions. She’s combative, sharp-tongued, and wields her film camera as fiercely as Foxy Brown throws a punch. Prompted by the white walls of her institution, Samantha takes to the airwaves of her school radio station to voice her oppression in the form of her radio show. No matter how nuanced the injustice, Sam never misses a chance to provide her unsolicited opinion, nor does she shy away from calling out the more humorously tiresome habits of the white majority around her:

“Dear white people on Instagram. You own an iPhone and like hikes. We get it.”

Not all black students at Winchester rally behind Samantha’s fight against all things white. Political Science major Troy Fairbanks (Brandon P. Bell) is handsome, knows how to work a crowd, and is the right amount of black for his white peers. He is quick to reclaim the n-word around his non-black circles, but comfortable in dating his white girlfriend, Sophia, the daughter of Winchester University’s president. When Troy is dethroned as head of Winchester’s historically black residence hall, Armstrong-Parker, he is along for the ride as Sam and the Black Student Union attempt to preserve the legacy of the house as the epicenter of black student life on campus.

Then there is Lionel Higgins (Tyler James Williams), whose only common ground with Troy is the color of his skin. He listens to Mumford and Sons. He watches Robert Altman movies. He’s gay, and is overlooked by white and black students alike. Happenstance grants Lionel an atypical moment of attention when a senior staff writer from the school paper puts him in charge of writing a story about race dynamics on campus. Once invisible, he is now thrust into the height of a racial war.

The heart of Simien’s message comes pristinely packaged in the form of Colandrea Connors, who defiantly calls herself Coco. With straightened hair and blue contact lenses, Teyonah Parris effortlessly plays the dogged antihero willing to do anything to forsake her blackness. At first glance, Coco’s pursuit to assimilate with her white peers tricks us into writing her off as a black girl from the Southside of Chicago who is ashamed of her race. However, in moments of deep inner turmoil, Coco’s vulnerability broadcasts Simien’s racial discourse in a rich, dense, and humanizing way.

A revealing moment of Coco’s intricate dilemmas comes in the form of a YouTube video she posts after a white housemate crassly mistakes her hair for a weave (or in her exact words: weaved). Coco, backed into a corner, attempts to confront her peers’ perceptions of her identity by opening her webcam and delivering a carefully worded, sassy rant declaring how dark and lovely her skin truly is.

If we simply replace the word “weave” with “racism” during Coco’s video rant about her hair (which is a wig), we can see the entire message of the film packaged in one quick, verbal jab:

“Say it right, please. It’s racism. Now. Present tense.”

And present tense is where the state of racism remains. The strength of Dear White People comes in the film's lack of resolution. Simien reminds us all that even in the Ivy League, prejudice is alive and well. More acutely, his lens points to the limitless insensitivity and ignorance that can appear when encountering black people.

But, let's be clear. Black people are not off the hook.

Simien weaves a myriad of conflicts between his central characters, often within themselves. The film makes frequent use of vignettes that both saturate and wash out the color of the scenes, alluding to blacksploitation films of black cinema’s past, while addressing contemporary struggles of what it means to be black.

Spike Lee used five people from a neighborhood in diverse Brooklyn to continue the conversation on racial stereotypes. Over 20 years later, Simien uses a college campus. More than anything, Dear White People should be a wake up call. Race is still something that needs to be talked about.

 

1 Dear White People: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/dear-white-peopl