For the 2014 film Dear White People, writer and director Justin Simien turned the conventional ways Black people are presented onscreen upside down. Its young, precocious, Black characters thoughtfully discussed issues of racism and discrimination and confronted the realities of micro-aggressions driven by anti-Black racism in pointed, sometimes fourth-wall breaking dialogue.
But while the film craftily challenged some stereotypes and should live among Spike Lees Do The Right Thing or Barry Jenkinss Moonlight in cinematic history, Simien failed to break with convention in a very important area: Dear White People continued the tradition of leaving Black women out of all meaningful and redeeming lead roles. Worse, Netflix’s Dear White People television series inherits this problem of erasure.
The series picks up with five students at the fictional Winchester University a few days after a Dear Black People-themed, Blackface party on campus.
Each episode is told through a different character’s point of view, detailing the experiences that shaped each and their response to the events surrounding the Blackface party. The format lends each character more depth than the film. But by the end, I was left wondering: in such an intimate study of the Black experience, why leave out the perspective of a woke and empowered Black woman?
The politics of colourism cannot be ignored here. Of the scarce number of roles available to women of colour in Hollywood, racialized women with lighter complexions are cast more frequently in African American roles an issue actors like Viola Davis and Lupita Nyongo have discussed in interviews. (Nyong’o famously addressed the issue of colourism in her acceptance speech for her Oscar-winning role in 12 Years a Slave in 2014).
Amidst the tense fallout from a love-triangle gone wrong, central character Samantha White (Logan Browning) says to her BFF Joelle Brooks (Ashley Blaine Featherson), say something funny and specific. In the episodes preceding the moment, Joelle is the force keeping this love triangle from imploding. Now, like so many moments before this, Sam relies on Joelle to boost her spirits.
“Is it just me or is Drake’s entire career a response to that episode of Degrassi (The Next Generation) when he was in the wheelchair and couldn’t get it up.” They both share a laugh.
This scene is emblematic of the dynamic at play in Dear White People. Sam, the face and voice of a movement that previously had no direction or strategy, enjoys a moment of reprieve from her personal drama, free to gain perspective around her higher calling the “revolution.” Its bigger than me, she laments. But Joelle, one of two dark-skinned Black protagonists, cements her role as the sassy, Black sidekick.
Throughout the series, Black men and racially ambiguous women get to take the lead. Meanwhile, Black women can be counted on for lending their support from the periphery with funny one-liners or playing the antithesis to the cause like Coco Conners (Antoinette Robertson).
Sam is an excellent role model, she’s inspiring and her speeches, filled with rage and bold defiance, offer moments of catharsis. And Browning does an exceptional job playing her. But representation matters. Intersectionality matters. In much the same way new miniseries Guerrilla, starring Idris Elba and Freida Pinto, has come under fire for its erasure of Black women in a narrative centered around Black political activism, Dear White People also plays down the importance of Black, female representation in the Black empowerment movement. A move reflecting the historical treatment of Black, female civil rights leaders.
When we’re not talking about Malcolm X or Martin Luther King Jr, praise is often given to incredible (and deserving) women like Angela Davis, Kathleen Cleaver, and Elaine Brown for their work for Black liberation, but their efforts often overshadow the work of Assata Shakur (also a member of the Black Panther Party, who headed its Harlem chapter), Mae Mallory (who championed school desegregation and organized a grassroots organization advocating for adequate resources in schools attended by marginalized children) and Claudette Colvin (who refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama at the age of 15 – before the venerable Rosa Parks).
“Dear White People: bet you think this show is about you,” reads the show’s tagline. But it isn’t. Its about us. And we have a responsibility to pass around the blowhorn.
Here’s hoping Dear White People will sort out its issue with its Black female characters in the second season.
shantalo@nowtoronto.com | @Shantal_Ot
