Back to school
Dear White People creator Justin Simien goes back to school in the second season of the hit US comedy, writes Yvonne Villarreal.
OPEN Instagram: Justin Simien has a message for you.
The second season of Dear
White People, the television continuation of the 2014 independent film, has just been released on Netflix, and Simien, its 35yearold mastermind, has been reviewing audience scores of the debut season on Rotten Tomatoes.
While the series — which explores race relations, identity and privilege at a predominantly white fictional Ivy League university — received a 100% fresh rating with critics, its audience rating was a more dubious 65%.
Questioning how many of the low scores were given by people who never actually watched the show, Simien has taken to Instagram to post some quickie videos to voice his frustrations.
‘‘I am so tired of these [expletive] having the narrative,’’ Simien, seated in a car, says into his camera phone and posts for his 17,000 followers to view. ‘‘Like, I saw this thing that was like ‘critics love it, but audiences are divided’. Audiences are not divided . . . these people didn’t see this show. Why do they get the narrative? Why do they get it?’’
It’s something that has puzzled Simien since before the first season was released. Written and shot as Barack Obama was finishing his second term as president, the first season challenged the notion that America was in a postracial era.
After Netflix unveiled a teaser trailer of the first season early last year, a few months after Donald Trump was elected president, many people took to social media with messages that labelled the satirical comedy as ‘‘racist’’ and ‘‘supporting white genocide’’ — some even proclaimed they’d cancel their subscriptions to the streaming service.
The vitriol (or as Simien refers to it, the ‘‘brigade of trolls and automated hateorade’’) stung Simien then. And, judging by the presentday Instagram posts, it still stings a bit now.
‘‘I treat it like a game, because it is,’’ Simien says a few days after posting the messages. ‘‘My therapist, of all people, has the most disturbing and wonderful saying I’ve ever heard, which is: in another hundred years, there’s all new people. Which is just a really, sort of, existential way of saying really none of this . . . matters. There will be no you for it to matter to. All of these annoying trolls will be gone as well. I try not to be frustrated.’’
Try or not, it certainly made him curious. And it prompted a storytelling thread in Season 2 about altright internet trolls. In addition to cyberbullying, the second season, now available to stream on Netflix, delves deeper into racial tensions, conscious or subconscious, after the school’s allblack dorm, Armstrong Parker, becomes integrated following a fire at a nearby dorm.
Of course, recent months have seen racial and political discord play out to the extreme on US college campuses — something that is not lost on Simien.
‘‘For me, I had a sense of urgency,’’ Simien says of tackling Season 2 during the Trump presidency. ‘‘When I left Season 1, I certainly had a very specific experience being the target of some
altright trolls. And what I found so interesting about the experience was, it wasn’t just being the target of blind hate. I felt that people were using this blind hate to kind of mobilise.
‘‘For the first time, in my own time, I saw this kind of blind racial outrage being weaponised. And the more and more I read and looked into the history of our country, the more I saw it. And I saw how the ignorance of people is step one in any kind of takeover. This constant erasing of our history and telling people to just get over things . . . We have a cultural historical amnesia in this country, and as citizens, and I think it’s just, honestly, really irresponsible.’’
If it feels like Simien has a lot to say on the topic, he does. It’s a balmy afternoon and Simien, who has just returned from a trip to Italy with his partner, is delving into a lot while seated at the kitchen table of his new, not fully movedin English Tudor home. (Some of the decorative flourishes include a block print of Michael Jackson on the living room mantle, multiple copies of
Vanity Fair with cover girl — and Simien’s bestie — writer Lena Waithe and a notyethung framed art print inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001:
A Space Odyssey.)
He talks of the importance of education and understanding history, shared and not shared.
‘‘There are people in this country who still think slavery was a volunteer programme,’’ Simien says, weeks before rapper Kanye West would make headlines with his charged comments about slavery being a ‘‘choice’’. It gets him talking about what he sees as the residual effects of slavery — everything from income inequality to housing, to the school and prison pipeline.
‘‘If we would just all be on the same page about that, we could do some amazing things,’’ he says.
He doesn’t expect his Netflix show to fix the problem. But he hopes it will get people to listen.
‘‘I don’t think it’s an educational show, and I don’t think it’s a fingerwagging show,’’ Simien says. ‘‘The truth is, I’m talking about the human condition through the lens of my race. But I’m not just talking about my race. I’m just trying to tell stories. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.’’
Growing up in Houston as a ‘‘little gay, Catholic black boy’’ who lost his father at a young age, Simien says he spent much of his childhood never quite knowing how to be in the world.
‘‘I think it took me a while to even realise, as an adult, how traumatic a lot of that was,’’ Simien says. ‘‘I just never felt right. I had to put on layers of personality to be OK in a given space. The one thing that felt really clear to me was movies. I remember very early knowing that I wanted to make stuff that was on TV and in movie theatres. I remember seeing
The Wiz before I could talk. I remember how I felt coming home from Beauty and the Beast.’’ He laughs when he shares how, as a kid, he’d turn up the Jurassic Park soundtrack and bring out his action figures to make movies in his head.
He attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Houston — where he became acquainted with the work of Kubrick (his idol), Bob Fosse and Spike Lee — and later moved west to attend Chapman University in Orange, where he studied film.
He eventually moved to Los Angeles after graduation and took on various positions at studios, including as a publicity assistant at Focus Features and a social media manager at Sony Television. All the while, he would work on scripts — including what eventually would materialize into Dear White People.
— TCA
Dear White People is available to
stream via Netflix.