‘Dear White People’ confronts alt-right

Justin Simien says Web trolling mirrors reality

Justin Simien couldn’t have timed

Dear White People’s return to Kanye West’s latest Twitter spree.

But the overlap creates interesting symmetry between the rapper and the Netflix series’ protagonist, Sam (Logan Browning), an outspoken, biracial student at an Ivy League university who invokes the wrath of alt-right trolls in the comedy’s second-season premiere (now streaming).

While West has been lauded by conservatives for his pro-Trump tweets, Sam continues to receive blowback from racist cyberbullies for her failed race-relations protest and radio show

Dear White People, which she obsessively defends on Twitter.

“It’s another example of some of these things we talk about in the writers’ room that we think we’re being satirical about, and there it is in the real world,” says Simien, who created the series. “Not that we have an explicit Kanye West reference in the new season, but we certainly get into how people of color end up being a spokesperson (for their race) against their best interest.”

Simien, who also wrote and directed the 2014 film on which the show is based, chats about its new season.

Question: When the season picks up, there’s still unrest at Winchester University after the campus protest and blackface party. Why bring racist Internet trolls into the mix?

Justin Simien: It’s a new weapon, this idea of using outrage to rile people up across the ideological spectrum. (The series) got “backlash” on the Internet and I started to understand how these bots and trolls were being used to make a marginal community seem a lot louder and more powerful than they are. The more I looked into history and tried to figure out how we got here, the more I realized this is a common feature of (white) America, that idea of, “What are you guys complaining about? You’re free.” That’s been used against black people literally since slavery was abolished. We wanted to explore that, and also, who are these voices behind (alt-right accounts) and how did they get there?

Q: To research, you dug around message boards and comments sections to see how white nationalists organized online. What did you find that

surprised you most?

Simien: Well, I didn’t realize that they made (online) fliers. Like, “Hey guys,

Dear White People hits Netflix on suchand-such a date. Click here to flood this message board and click here to bug their IMDb page.” They have this kind of group-planned celebration of taking down black properties . ... I’ve always wondered if this was an organized attack ever since we did the movie, but with the show, the vitriol was not only so specific, but so repetitive. It was clear it wasn’t coming from people who had seen the show at all or had any context.

What it led me to is, there’s a set of people who feel there’s really something at stake, so much so that they want to create a false narrative around it. That really played a lot into figuring out what Season 2 was going to be about, and how that affected the personal lives of some of the characters people have come to love. We found a way to thread all of that together in a really organic way, because the show is in many ways about a (radio) show called “Dear White People” as much as it

is a show called Dear White People. So the reaction to us in the real world almost always has a really interesting parallel to what’s happening to Sam and her friends.

Justin Simien