Justin Simien: 'Dear White People'

Since its debut at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, “Dear White People” has received gratifying critical acclaim for its witty and sophisticated reflection on racism. However, the film does not stop at discussing race as a generalized social issue. It also deals with the universal struggle to define one’s personal identity and how it can become extremely complex when race is involved. To address these topics, the film focuses on the lives of four black students at a predominantly white college. Each of them represents a particular stance on the question of identity, and all of them have changed in one way or another by the end of the film.

Director Justin Simien started the project in 2006 with the notion of making a truly “human” film about black people. “I was frustrated that black people, or in fact any marginalized group, are often portrayed as either exoticized heroes or victims of drugs and violence,” he said. While films with white protagonists typically deal with their personal pursuits and experiences, those about black people often ignore their individuality and abstract them only as components of a particular community. “It has a subtle effect on us, suggesting that if you are not a white man, life is not a complicated experience of being a human,” he said.

In Simien’s opinion, this cultural predicament exists not only in films but also in the wider society. “If you are black or female or gay, you would grow up hearing other people’s opinions about you, whether they are people within your community or outside of your community, and identity is stuck,” he said. “I was asking, ‘Am I black enough?’ or, ‘Am I too black?” in the first 15 years of my life…but generally if you are a white man in America, that type of question would not even occur to you. Much sooner in your life would you ask yourself, “Who am I?’” According to Simien, the fact that certain opinions and prejudices are troubling the lives of other groups, either mentally or materially, is evidence that racism persists today. In the same regard, he discredits so-called ‘reverse racism.’ “‘Dear White People’ or jokes that black comedians make or any other expression of minority groups have no actual impact on the daily life of a white person,” he said. “I believe that reverse prejudice exists, and it doesn’t feel comfortable, but racism is more complicated, more systematic than that.”

In “Dear White People,” Simien portrays this complicated, systematic influence and its impact on the search for identity through the four main characters. They are Sam White (Tessa Thompson), an anti-racism activist running for the president of the all-black Armstrong Parker House, Coco Conners (Teyonah Parris), a black girl who has straightened hair and only dates white guys, Troy Fairbanks (Brandon P. Bell), another candidate for house president who agrees with the school’s proposal to make Parker/Armstrong multi-racial, and Lionel Higgins (Tyler James Williams), assigned by the school newspaper to cover everything happening in Armstrong Parker with only a cursory knowledge of black culture. Many of these characters can be traced back to Simien himself when he was a student at Chapman University. “At college I thought I was Lionel, not fitting into any category. I didn’t have the typical black male haircut; I didn’t listen to the right music or wear the right clothes. But then I found my niche and built my persona, and I felt more Sam-ish. Right now I feel I’m an integration of all of them,” he said.

Writing a multi-protagonist movie is always challenging and does not always pay off. Simien was aware that many audiences are conditioned to single narratives and that it might take a while to catch up with a multi-protagonist story. “In film school I literally read a book that said, ‘You are not Robert Altman, so don’t try!’” However, Simien believed that the social situations black people are dealing with are multi-faceted, and only such a narrative would present a comprehensive picture. To avoid the slow pace and overloaded information often associated with multi-line narratives, he spent a long time studying “Fame,” “Do the Right Thing,” and “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

When it comes to the influences for the film, it is worth commenting that while “Dear White People” has intentional references to many directors, most people might only notice those to Spike Lee. “The good thing is that Spike Lee happens to be a hero of mine, and it’s flattering that Spike and I can appear in the same sentence,” he said. But in general, Simien finds it frustrating that the media are always comparing black directors to other black directors. To some degree, this phenomenon may reflect the very problems that “Dear White People” is concerned with: the impact of stereotypical opinion on particular communities.

—Contributing writer Tianxing V. Lan can be reached at tianxinglan@college.harvard.edu.