Meet Justin Simien, the director of Dear White People , the movie everyone’s going to be talking about. “In a nation that is increasingly more diverse, you’re at a handicap the more you refuse to see the world through other people’s points of views,” he told BuzzFeed News.
Dear White People writer/director Justin Simien.
Jon Premosch/BuzzFeed News
The greatest throwaway line in Dear White People? It might just be the hilarious summary that Sam White (Tessa Thompson), the movie's incendiary race warrior, offers her professor of her "15-page unsolicited treatise on why the Gremlins is actually about suburban white fear of black culture."
"The gremlins are loud, talk in slang, are addicted to fried chicken, and freak out when you get their hair wet," she points out.
Dear White People, which is now open in limited release, may be filled with razor-edged quips like that, but it's so much more than just a clever comedy. Set in a tony, mostly white private college where a group of students decides to throw a "black-themed" party (there's little fiction needed in that plot development), it's an electrifyingly zeitgeisty depiction of a "post-racial" America where tensions and ignorance haven't actually miraculously disappeared. It's also a nuanced portrayal of how the typical collegiate search for identity intersects with the experience of being one of the few people of color in the room.
The movie premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, but feels even more timely after a year that's included events as major as Ferguson and as recent as the unveiling of The Whiteness Project. And the themes it tackles are ones that writer/director Justin Simien has been considering for much longer than that. The first-time filmmaker traces the germination of Dear White People back to his own experiences at Chapman University in Orange County, where he found himself in an environment that was considerably less diverse than the Houston performing arts high school from which he'd come. "I felt very free to be myself in my high school," he told BuzzFeed News. "In college... I didn't quite feel that way."
Tyler James Williams
Ashley Nguyen/Roadside Attractions
Simien, who is now based in Los Angeles, would have long conversations with his friends about "how we live in a world where everyone thinks that we're over racism, but we are feeling it and sensing it in our everyday lives." It was his yearning to put that reality on screen, to make a movie about the "American experience through a black lens," that led to Dear White People, as well as his desire to make something in the tradition of the late '80s and early '90s black films he loves, from Do The Right Thing and Hollywood Shuffle to Love Jones.
Dear White People splits its focus between four different characters that Simien described as "rounding out the possibilities of being a person of color and trying to reach your potential in a society where you're not necessarily reflected." There's Sam, the biracial film student and Black Student Union leader who runs the provocative radio show of the title ("Dear white people: the amount of black friends required not to seem racist has just been raised to two — sorry, your weed man, Tyrone, doesn't count.") and whose genuine frustration and passion has led her to commit to an image she can't always live up to. There's Troy (Brandon P Bell), the son of the dean (Dennis Haysbert) and, as Simien put it, "the representative black man, the Theo Huxtable of the group," who is struggling under the pressure to maintain his perfect image.
The always immaculate, class-sensitive Coco (Teyonah Parris) — full name Colandrea — openly aspires to find herself "a Gosling" as a boyfriend, and resents being automatically grouped into the historically black residence hall and feeling like her race has predetermined how she's perceived. And Lionel (Tyler James Williams), who, like Simien, is openly gay, doesn't feel like he fits in anywhere — he's shy and loves Robert Altman and Mumford & Sons, and tells the dean that it's the other black kids who were the worst to him in high school. Lionel lives, miserably, in the house ruled over by Kurt (Kyle Gallner), the bratty son of the university's president and head of its Harvard Lampoon-esque humor magazine, and the one who comes up with the idea for the offensive party.
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