Dear White People Review
Yesterday Kaya FM hosted a screening of a film called ‘Dear White People’ at Ster-Kinekor’s Cinema Nouveau in Rosebank and I was lucky enough to crack an invite. Dear White People is a satirical film about being a black face in a predominately white place, it’s quirky and the title is totally provocative. We live in a beautiful world no doubt, and yes we have come a long way as a people but we still have a long way to go. This film talks about these issues, issues of race relations, identity, self-acceptance, sexual orientation and stereotyping, and it tries to begin a dialogue, of course, no one has the answers, but we should all ask questions, a bunch of them. I hope this film will help us, black and white folks, to look at each other in the eyes and ask ourselves; what can we do to get better? If we can’t do it for our kids, let’s at least do it for Nelson Mandela and Martin Lurther King, right? Before I put you off, this film is not a morality play, it does not say this is definitively right and that is definitively wrong. The core theme for me is identity crisis, something we all experience in different degrees, we all experience conflict,when we project an identity or boxed into one by society or our parents or even our friends.
The film was written, produced and directed by Justin Simien and he had to raise the money to make the film via a crowd-funding site ‘Indiegogo’, because Hollywood wouldn’t fund a film that didn’t fit the “black movie” paradigm, the big studios in Tinseltown don’t want anything that’s new and out of the box, anything that isn’t Tyler Perry. Luckily there is a monumental hunger for a more varied portrayal of the black experience in cinema, so the people funded the film so to speak. Dear White People stars (amongst others) Tyler James Williams from ‘Everybody Hates Chris’ and the ever so gorgeous Tessa Thompson, you might know her from Tyler Perry’s ‘For Colored Girls’. Sam White (played by Thompson) is a biracial girl who is struggling with the issue of assimilation on a preponderantly white Winchester University campus and she has a show on the campus radio station called: Dear White People and she is an angry girl, I think the source of her anger is how apathetic we have all become, our inability to look at the landscape around us and call a spade a spade.
I thought the film was fun, entertaining and enjoyable. I was also impressed by how the characters where written, how they are well layered and how Justin Simien was able to juxtapose a black face party that’s brewing on campus and how the characters deal with racial tension and their everyday issues. The film takes into consideration the history of modern black cinema, there are some deliberate references of Spike Lee’s ‘Do The Right Thing’ and some of the inconsistencies of Tyler Perry’s movies. For me, this film touched and moved me a lot, not because of the violation I felt, when white kids in Stellenbosch threw a black face party recently, but, mostly because I share the sentiment that blacks can’t be racist, prejudiced yes, but not racist, like Sam White I believe that “racism describes a system of disadvantage based on race”, something that Andile Mngxitama has been preaching for years. Many people might not agree with that and that’s ok, at least let’s talk about it, I think that’s what Justin Simien had intended with this film.