YOUTH Magazine| Review: Is Dear White People Racist?

by: Sade Smith

No. Dear White People isn’t racist. In fact, this question and a myriad of other race-based questions are answered throughout this sarcastic and “yasss” filled 2014 dramedy.

 This fearless feature film by writer and director Justin Simien contained not only the oh so sensitive racism in America, but the intra-racial prejudice that is often overlooked by the Black community. When this movie first began, I got a serious School Daze (1988) feel from the way the characters were portrayed in such an exaggerated, but empathetic light. Ironically named, Samantha White is played by Tessa Thompson, the African-American undergraduate at the Ivy League, Winchester University. She is also the creator and host of “Dear White People”, a campus radio broadcast in which she attacks the undermining of everyday racism that white people so often use, such as: “Dating a Black person to piss off your parents is a form of racism” And my personal favorite, “The minimum requirement of Black friends needed to not seem racist has just been raised to two; sorry, but your weed-man Tyrone, does not count”. 

Throughout this movie, references are made to the past, present, and current forms of racism that affect our country. It doesn’t force anyone to try and solve racism or imagine a non-racial utopia, but rather it fixates on the simple, and still belittled fact that racism does still exist. And the other fact that Black people literally cannot be racist, seeing as racism is defined as “the systematic and social oppression by the superior race, of the inferior race”. Towards the end of the plot, there is a blatantly racist and jaw dropping party thrown by the popular Kurt, editor of the university’s comedy magazine, and shameless jerk. He enlists his peers to come dressed in their best “baggy white t-shirts and Jordans”, clutching 40’s and “bring bitches and hoes galore”. An obvious stab to the Black community and its mainstream music culture, the party is a mirroring of incidents similar at colleges such as Dartmouth College and Oklahoma University. The party ends without a bang, students scatter, and administration takes less than lethal action that corresponds with something that of our past Presidents. J

Now, if you cannot be entertained by the heavy and overlooked topic of racism in America, then this movie is not for you. Its witty characters and raw formula for disaster serve up a nearly iconic way to write a letter to white Americans.