'Dear White People': The Story Behind Netflix's Controversial, Must-See Comedy

"Man, look at it out there,"Justin Simien says, gesturing to the window of the hotel suite he's currently holding court in. It's early February, and the city has just been hit by a blizzard that feels damn near Biblical; the streets below us, as well as the whole of Madison Square Park, are covered by an endless blanket of eye-blinding white. "It's like New York has been covered in Trump voters!"


The two stars of Simien's Netflix show Dear White People who are sitting to his left, Logan Browning and Brandon P. Bell, start belly-laughing along with him. A second ago, they'd all been earnestly debating the pros and cons of attending a standard, integrated state university versus an HBCU (Historically Black College and University); one weather-related wisecrack from the writer-director later, the three of them are riffing on the troll-term "snowflakes" and joking about renaming the show Dear Woke People. It's the sort of yes-we-are-going-there humor that made Simien's feature-film comedy about college campus politics stand out from the Sundance pack when it took the festival by storm in 2014. For those worried that the TV version (which starts streaming on the service today) would tone down the take-no-prisoners attitude, rest assured: If anything, the racial-satire razors have become even sharper the second time around.
And though we rejoin the incendiary college radio D.J. Samantha White (Browning), the handsome buppie-to-be Troy (Bell, reprising his role), the gay muckraking journalist Lionel (DeRon Horton) and other students of the fictional Winchester University, Simien is not delivering an Obama-era period piece. He's clearly weaponized Dear White People's skewering of identity politics, ideological stand-offs and the stunning ignorance that's become the War Over Diversity's stock-in-trade for the here and now. "The movie came out of that post-racial bubble we were in, where we all thought we'd solved the problem," he says, shaking his head. "We are clearly not in those times anymore. So yeah, I wanted to stick with these characters, but let's move the story forward. The movie ended with seeing a bunch of kids throw a blackface party – and while that's fucked up, that's not the most alarming thing I'm seeing going on in our country at the moment.
"I saw the film's ending as more of a starting point, considering all that's happened," Simien adds. "And all that's happening."

Watch Dear White People Trailer 

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