During summer break or on the days I stayed home from school, I loved watching daytime television as a kid, especially the talk shows. And, in some ways, it’s interesting to contemplate how some of the taboos of even the late 1980s and early 1990s have fallen away, to some degree. We really don’t worry anymore about whether it’s okay for unmarried couples to live together, or if it’s appropriate for women to work a full-time job instead of being barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen the way we once did when Oprah would probably devote an hour to those topics. But not all of the issues of the past have gone away, and some just evolved to take on different forms.
I specifically remember an episode of Donahue dealing with interracial marriage and biracial children. One of Phil Donahue’s guests told a story of how her father explained race with two boxes of ice cream—one chocolate and one vanilla. The dad mixed the ice cream in a bowl and then asked the girl to separate them, using it as an analogy to explain how the woman is a product of two cultures, both are a part of who she is, and that’s okay. Now, as a young kid watching this, I thought it was a sweet story of a father trying to make his child feel comfortable in a world that’s not always kind and understanding. However, the reason I recall this segment is I remember what happened next. Donahue took a phone call from a black woman who thought the entire story was ridiculous. Because Donahue’s biracial guest “looked” black, the caller argued the ice cream, her daddy’s analogy, and no matter how many drops of white blood the woman had, her genetic makeup didn’t mean jack shit, because the world would see a black woman and treat her accordingly.
As someone with parents from different ethnic backgrounds, when I was younger I resented people like the phone caller, who I saw as pushing people into boxes, making assumptions based on appearances, and arguably accepting societal judgments of who someone is that were formed by a bunch of assholes. Who is anyone to tell anyone else who they are because of being seen and judged through someone else’s eyes? What gives anyone else the right to dictate what kind of dress someone is allowed to wear, which hairstyle is acceptable, or what music they should listen to based on their appearance, orientation, or any other number of irrelevant criteria? In an ideal world, why should a melanin count, or the structure of facial features, or who someone chooses to love, define who they are?
But we don’t live in an ideal world, and I would be lying to say there wasn’t some truth in the phone caller’s position. I can speak from experience. I remember having a family dinner at a Florida Golden Corral as a kid and getting stares from another table because our family didn’t quite ... match. I remember being called “the white kid” at some family functions, and conversely getting the feeling of being treated like an “other” when visiting some white relatives. The sad reality is we do live in a world where people too often judge books by their covers. It’s the reason people of color can’t sit at a Starbucks, rent an AirBnB, or take a nap while studying at their university without someone getting concerned out of ingrained prejudice. While all of this is fucked up enough as it is, the more insidious prejudices are the ones we sometimes place on ourselves, either as a reaction, or as a way to compensate, or in ways we don’t even realize.
And that’s where things get complicated.
Based on his 2014 film of the same name, Netflix’s adaptation of Justin Simien’s Dear White People has been very relevant to ideas of race and community, given the current climate and some recent incidents. But it has been pointed out that some of these issues should have been causes for concern for decades, and the film in some ways acted as a satirical commentary on millennial race relations in what some in white America assumed to be the post-racial society of the Obama era. To this end, the series details the racial tensions at a predominantly white Ivy League university, and how the politics of identity which people hold—both subtle and explicit—can be contradictory, tragic, and hilariously absurd when examined in the abstract. The premiere of the series on Netflix induced calls from the alt-right to boycott the show, and argued the series itself is “racist” against white people. While the current occupant of the White House is never mentioned by name, season two of the show centers itself on emboldened alt-right racist trolls, the aftereffects of trauma, and living in a country that seems a little less welcoming of differences than it was just a few years ago.
“Watch closely.”
—The Narrator (Giancarlo Esposito)
Samantha White (Logan Browning) is a media studies major and the host of a campus radio show called “Dear White People” which she uses to rail against racial aggressions, both micro and major. Samantha tries to keep secret her relationship with Gabe (John Patrick Amedori), her white “summer bae.” The biracial Samantha’s “blackness” is questioned by the other black students for having a sexual relationship with a white guy, as her best friend Joelle (Ashley Baine Featherson) and Reggie (Marque Richardson), a classmate with a crush on Sam, adjust to the news. Lionel Higgins (DeRon Horton), a nerdy-ish reporter for the school newspaper, tries to understand the racial ripples affecting the campus, while also opening up about being gay and the different perspective of blackness caused by a differing orientation. Troy Fairbanks (Brandon P. Bell)— son of Winchester’s Dean Fairbanks and aspiring student body president— both embraces and bristles at the privilege his father’s position provides. Troy has a very not-monogamous relationship with Colandrea "Coco" Conners (Antoinette Robertson), a dark-skinned black woman who has an antagonistic history with Samantha and purposely tones down her blackness in order to be more acceptable to white people.
The major event for volume 1 of the series was a blackface party thrown by the all-white members of a National Lampoon-style humor magazine at the fictional Winchester University campus. The incident reveals the divisions among the students in both how they see the racism and how they deal with it. There are white students who don’t see what the big deal is. There are white students who want to “help,” and either do it ineffectual ways or don’t know what they’re supposed to do. There are black students who want to go along to get along, There are black students who want to protest, fight, and resist. And there are people of all stripes who just don’t give a damn.
All of this led to a second party, which seemed to point to a possible way forward where everyone got along and decided to just have some fun. However, it ends with a debate over n-word privileges and a campus cop pulling his gun on a black student—Reggie— demanding to see his ID, while inflicting some mental trauma. This further inflames the situation on the campus, resulting in a town hall meeting, protests, fractures in relationships, ending the “self-segregation” of black students in one of the campus’ dorm halls, and Troy breaking a door in frustration and getting thrown in the back of a cop car for his troubles.
Volume 2 picks up just a few weeks after volume 1. White students have indeed been moved into the campus’ traditionally black dorm after a fire which occurred around the time of the protests, and were treated as suspected rioting “because, you know, black people were involved,” as the show’s narrator sardonically relates the information to the audience. Reggie is still suffering from the mental repercussions of having a gun in his face. Troy’s defiance and brush with law-breaking has tarnished his goody two shoes image and thrown a snag in his father’s plans for his future, but endeared him to the ladies, which he uses to get “sympathy pussy.”
The reaction from some of the white students and conservative elements mirrors present political currents. In response to the protests, a show called “Dear Right People” has popped up on the campus radio station to parrot conservative talking points about “all lives” mattering. And Sam has become a target of an alt-right Twitter troll, whom she can neither ignore or successfully shout down given the dynamics of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory and cultural shifts which have emboldened more open displays of racism.
From Joshua Rivera at GQ:
GQ: You get at some really tough questions in Volume 2, particularly in Sam's story—she has to deal with the question of what the endgame of her activism is, or what will make her feel like she no longer has to advocate for her personhood or fight against the trolls.
Justin Simien: I think something that's so wild is how common it is. It's called trolls now, but it's been a thing since African slaves were freed, there has been a concerted effort to somehow extract work and culture from these people but not to allow them a voice in the conversation about what happens to them. Baldwin would say white people reconciled with the trauma that they inflicted upon their brothers. People who have every right to be called citizens being treated like cattle—how do you collectively deal with the guilt over that? And he posited that you have to turn these people into animals, you have to invent Jim Crow, invent the nigger, invent pickaninny, invent all of these ideas other than "human beings," so that their voices don't really matter as much as yours and it's okay to treat them this way.
I think a lot of folks have seized upon that propensity in this country and have made a lot of decisions because of it. There's that sort of new Jim Crow talk about how, during the Nixon era, when Martin Luther King started to talk about the poor, and the working class, and how as much of an issue as race is, he was talking about, "Well why do we want to integrate into a burning house? Shouldn't we fix the house?"
If it’s not clear yet, this is a show about identity: the identity society assigns us, and the identities we choose to believe about ourselves. The characters are ciphers for different aspects of the black experience. The situation is both tragic and comically absurd when looked at objectively with all the contradictions.
Sam is someone whose militancy is to some degrees a reflection of her insecurities about how others perceive her blackness. Both Coco and Troy are people who’ve compromised to a certain degree in order to assimilate and be tolerated, and now wonder where they stand in a new environment. Lionel takes the first steps to being an openly gay man, but being a gay black man has different connotations. Gabe genuinely and imperfectly tries to be there for someone he has feelings for, attempts to examine what his responsibility is and how he can help, while experiencing what it’s like to be white and an outsider in a black social circle.
And finally, there’s Reggie. There are many slights one can experience in this life. And because there are many pricks in this world, there are all sorts of reasons for why people treat each other unkindly. But there’s a special kind of damage that’s done when one can’t make sense of the treatment, when one is meant to feel small, for no good goddamn reason other than an overreaction based in bias. And sometimes there is no way to make it right or take the damage away.
A running theme throughout volume 2 is how this type of damage evolves over time. And no matter how much opposition and progress has occurred, it keeps finding a way to persist. This is done through the narrator, who relates in each episode the history of the university, and how different groups and organizations either find a way to hold onto their biases or fail in protecting victims.
From Danette Chavez at the A.V. Club:
AVC: Dear White People is obviously much more pointed and political than any other college drama, but how do you think it fits in with other shows that are aimed at a similar age group, or that feature characters who are the same age, in college, etc.?
JS: The thing is, I don’t really see it as a college show. It does take place in college, but in the same way that Election takes place at a high school. It’s sort of purposely using this microcosm that we all know more or less the rules to, so we don’t have to in-depth explain what high school is like to anybody. Most people kind of get that even if their high school wasn’t like the high school in Election or the high school in Fame, we sort of understand the basic workings. The same thing is true for workplace comedies or family comedies. The appeal is that you don’t have to explain the world from scratch.
I want everyone who watches the show to keep watching it, but I definitely make it to be something that can be experienced not just emotionally as you’re going through the show with the characters, but also intellectually because we are making some rather dark commentary about the human condition, but certainly the American human experience that I don’t know is happening on other so-called college shows. When I think of other shows, my mind goes to places like Silicon Valley, which is another satire, or it goes to Atlanta, or shows that are using perhaps familiar television motifs to tell some dark—sometimes sophisticated, if we can manage it—stories. My goal is always to go a bit deeper into the human condition than maybe you even expected when you first pressed play. That’s always my goal as a writer. But that said, I think there are people who enjoy it on the level of, they just want to watch these characters quip and hang out, and that’s fine, too. I don’t want to discourage anyone from watching the show.
- Yeezy: Kanye West’s recent Twitter ramblings in support of Donald Trump, conservative pundit Candace Owen, and ideas about slavery are mirrored in some of volume 2’s storylines. The introduction of a character, whom Netflix has tried not to reveal the actor involved, seems prescient in commenting on the situation.
- Log Cabin Republicans: People make choices against their best interests all the time. But how does one get to a point where they can ignore explicit indications that the people they support will treat them as less than human? Poor people vote for rich assholes who are gonna screw them over to make other rich idiots richer. There are women who vote for people who think they shouldn’t be trusted with their own uterus. There are Latinos who voted for a dude who used them as scary charicatures to stoke fear and white resentment. And there are gays who are all in voting for people who think their very existence is a mistake and they’re destined to burn in hell. I’ve heard gay conservatives argue that to tie their vote to their orientation is an assumption that denies their agency to be a three-dimensional person. And, in fairness, just because someone is gay does not mean they can’t have conservative opinions on tax policy, spending, or any other number of issues. But still … Is a tax cut worth devoting one’s time to and electing people who consort with Nazi sympathizers? Volume 2 touches on this dynamic and how it doesn’t make any damn sense.