‘Dear White People’ is smart satire with mandatory dose of booze and parties

As you might suspect from the title, “Dear White People” is a smart, social satire on the tricky nature of race relations in this country.

Set at a fictional Ivy League university, the movie has all the trappings of a traditional campus comedy – obnoxious frat boys and sorority girls, nerdy nerds, political activists, clueless administrators, and the mandatory dose of sex, booze and parties.

But first-time director Justin Simien uses that framework not for cheap and easy laughs but as a vehicle to expose some of the rifts between, and within, races.

That’s not to say “Dear White People” isn’t funny. It’s funny alright, with a bite.

“Dear white people, the minimum requirement of black friends needed to not seem racist, has just been raised two. Sorry, but your weed man, Tyrone, does not count.”

That’s Sam, a black student who enjoys needling the mostly privileged white student population with her on-campus radio show, Dear White People. She has a long roster of do’s and don’ts.

“This just in,” she says, “dating a black person just to piss off your parents is a form of racism.”

This movie inevitably targets the latent and not-so-latent racism of the school’s white power structure. But what truly distinguishes “Dear White People” is its heavy focus on rifts within the African-American student body itself. This is a movie about the different ways to be a black face in a white place.

Sam, as a mixed race student, feels she needs to choose sides and decides on pushing Afrocentrism.

Troy is the suspiciously too-perfect alpha black male, equally comfortable with both races, and the campus’ Theo Huxtable.

Coco tries to aggressively assimilate to whatever culture will make her financially successful, and Lionel, being black and gay, doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere.

Barbs fly between all of them – cracks about Tyler Perry, Oprah, Spike Lee, Taylor Swift, Quentin Tarantino, and Lisa Bonet abound. Generational differences crop up too, as with this exchange between Sam and the fatherly black dean of students played Dennis Haysbert.

Sam: The role of counterculture is to wake up the mainstream.
Dean: I have furniture older than you. Counterculture? Is that what you think this is, your little show?
Sam: What about my show?
Dean: Your show is racist.
Sam: Black people can’t be racist. Prejudice? Yes. But not racist. Racism describes a system of disadvantage based on race. Black people can’t be racist since we don’t stand to benefit from such a system.
Dean: I’m sure it was tough growing up, wondering which side you fit into, feeling like you have to overcompensate, perhaps.
Sam: If that’s true, Dean, I’m not the only one.

None of the differences are resolved of course, but all the movie’s loose ends collide with a climactic white-boy frat party.

This very politically incorrect costume party has everyone dressing up as their favorite African-American stereotype. It’s a fittingly outrageous end, so outrageous as a matter of fact that the screenwriter/director initially dropped it from his script.

Simien says he thought the idea of an actual blackface college party strained credulity. But after a little research, he discovered that these kinds of parties were cropping up all over – the University of California at San Diego had what it called a Compton Cookout a couple of years ago, and more recently, prestigious schools like Yale and Dartmouth experienced the same thing.

“Blackface happens more often than not, which is bizarre,” says Simien. “But even without with the blackface it’s just this coded, ‘We’re going to celebrate Black History Month but showing up as thugs and pimps.’ There’s pimps and hoes parties, 90s hip hop parties, and all these coded ways for these communities of white kids, who obviously have limited access to actual black people. Otherwise they would know this isn’t cool, to sort of show up – and maybe in their mind – sort of show, or celebrate, or mock, I don’t know. It does happen with, or without the makeup, more often than I think anyone really realizes. ”

“Dear White People” opened nationally over the weekend.