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>Happy to Be Your Guide to Black Identity
Justin Simien Goes Mainstream With ‘Dear White People’
By NELSON GEORGE
OCT. 9, 2014

In the YouTube video “How to Fake You Watched the BET Awards,” two 20-ish black men run into each other at a coffee shop. One asks the other if he watched the ceremony, which is annually one of the year’s most-viewed cable shows among African-Americans. His companion stumbles for a reply.

Cut to a bespectacled, tie-wearing host, who says: “Are you black but not ‘black’ black? I get it. Things can get awkward when you are expected to participate in certain cultural touchstones, even though you don’t really care. You know you need to front, but how? Don’t worry. I got you.”

What follows are suggested responses (“Of course, man, did you see the fight?”; “Say what you will about his personal life, that Chris Brown can dance”) that are either satirical, droll or matter of fact, depending on your knowledge of or irritation with black mainstream pop culture. The video ends with our host observing, “Few things are more satisfying than living up to the racial stereotypes held about you by your closest friends.”

This post, which has had more than 56,000 views since the summer, is part of a medley of satirical short videos and public-service announcements on the Dear White People channel, a reflection of the worldview that the writer-director Justin Simien has been developing since 2006. His comic vision goes mainstream with the release of a feature film, also titled “Dear White People,” on Oct. 17. It was well received at the Sundance Film Festival in January, winning Mr. Simien a special jury award for breakthrough talent and getting him named one of Variety’s 10 directors to watch.

Set at fictional Winchester University, an Ivy League-style institution with financial problems, “Dear White People” focuses on African-American undergraduates connected both by race and their obsession with media, old-school and new:

Samantha White is the biracial campus provocateur, host of the incendiary radio show that gives the film its title.

Lionel Higgins is a socially awkward, gay would-be journalist trying to fit into highly stratified campus cliques.

Coco Conners burns for reality-show stardom, 100,000 followers on YouTube and acceptance by white and black gatekeepers, including a controversy-seeking TV talent scout.

Troy Fairbanks, son of Winchester’s dean, seeks membership on the staff of Pastiche, a satirical magazine modeled on The Harvard Lampoon, as a way to escape familial pressure to succeed.

The film has earned comparisons with two pointed late-'80s comedies, Spike Lee’s “School Daze” and Robert Townsend’s “Hollywood Shuffle,” but “Dear White People” is distinguished by a contemporary sensibility: not post-black, but very much 21st century as it tries to update and expand notions of black identity. With the civil rights generation fading in prominence, there’s latitude for myth making, and Mr. Simien finds his voice in the fluidity of current racial and sexual politics.

For Mr. Simien, a 31-year-old Texas native, the inspiration for “Dear White People” was his undergraduate years in Southern California at Chapman University. “A black face in a white place,” he said, is both the tagline for the movie and the reality of his life on campus, where only 1.6 percent of the student body is black.

While at Chapman, he was also coming to terms with his identity as a young gay man. This dual struggle informs the final film, though the idea would go through several permutations. Would it be a TV show, web series or feature film? At one point, Mr. Simien had a Robert Altman-style script, focused on eight characters. In this early stage of the writing, Mr. Simien found inspiration in the bold comic choices he saw on “Chappelle’s Show,” the 2003-6 Comedy Central series.

As Mr. Simien began making a living in Los Angeles, shooting shorts and looking for a way into the film industry, the character of the critical thinker Sam White became a constant.

“Sam White is bound by her identity,” Mr. Simien said. “I always heard her voice in my head as she’s juggling gender issues and two racial identities. I anchored the piece around her. She came out part Lisa Bonet and part Angela Davis.”

To develop the script and build a following for the concept, Mr. Simien began tweeting as Sam White under the handle @dearwhitepeople. He tested jokes, and many of his tweets, as well as some of the responses, a few of them hostile, ended up in the script verbatim.

Another crucial element was Lionel, who’s “on the opposite end of the identity struggle from Sam,” Mr. Simien said. “Where she’s bound by her identity, Lionel doesn’t have much of one. To surrender your ego, you have to have one first. I find that black gay men in the culture are usually portrayed in the most extreme way. We are used to the exoticized version.”

With the help of a tax refund, Mr. Simien shot a “Dear White People” trailer in 2012 that led to a successful Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign, raising $50,000 and attracting the attention of film industry veterans like the Los Angeles Film Festival director and independent producer Stephanie Allain (“Hustle & Flow”), who wound up serving as an executive producer of the project.

Her teenage daughter “freaked out over the trailer,” Ms. Allain said, and her former assistant Mel Jones, who became the film’s associate producer, urged her to read the script. “This was a week before my festival, and I was swamped,” she recalled. But she read it and found that “I loved Justin’s mind: smart, funny and totally on point.”

Besides, she added, “as a black face in the mostly white place of Hollywood, it stuck a chord.”

After seven years of writing and pushing, Mr. Simien finally shot his film over 20 days at the University of Minnesota last summer, anchoring the film around a gifted cast of young actors, including Tessa Thompson as Sam, Tyler James Williams (from “Everybody Hates Chris”) as Lionel and Teyonah Parris (“Mad Men”) as Coco.

“Dear White People” opens with its lead characters watching a news report about a campus riot at a hip-hop-theme party where white students cavort in blackface. If that’s not disturbing enough, they are not simply watching TV, but each is staring directly into the camera with uncomfortable intensity. It’s as if they’re watching us as we watch them, a visual motif that Mr. Simien and his director of photography, Topher Osborn, use throughout the film.

“For me, it’s about the impact of mass culture, what it says about them and what’s impressed upon” the characters, Mr. Simien said. “It forces you to make judgments about them that during the course of the film we take apart.”

One of the more provocative themes of “Dear White People” is the appropriation of hip-hop by the white mainstream.

“Hip-hop isn’t dead by any means,” Mr. Simien said, “but it’s not something I define my black identity with. Hip-hop is pop now. It has officially been co-opted by the mainstream. It’s not ours anymore. It’s not the cutting edge of black music anymore. I find myself listening to Blood Orange and Janelle Monáe and artists like that.”

In a year marked by the death of several unarmed young black men around the nation, Mr. Simien said he hoped his film resonated with millennials. “I’m really looking at people whose postracial bubble is yet to be popped,” he said. “I want this to be part of a cross-cultural conversation they’ve never had before. Our movie couldn’t have come out at a better time.”

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Some of you post as if rap music taught you how to be hard.