Netflix's provocative series 'Dear White people' is an education on the politics of race

05 May 2017 - 02:00 By Andrew Donaldson
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A campus culture war comes to a head in ’Dear White People’.
A campus culture war comes to a head in ’Dear White People’.
Image: NETFLIX

There's something perplexing about the students at Winchester University, the Ivy League college in which the "woke" comedy-drama of the first season of 'Dear White People' unfolds over 10 episodes on Netflix.

We have the reassuringly familiar cut-out characters of pop culture: the jock, the nerd, the rebel, the queen bee, the angry guy, the "best friend" with a crush, the guy coming to terms with his sexuality, and so on.

But what jars here - at least at first - is how screechy-preachy they all are.

Big on didactic satire and overstuffed with signifiers, there doesn't seem to be a moment when there isn't an issue that's being unpacked, or someone who isn't holding forth in a significant debate, or lecturing somebody in an undergraduate manner.

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The good news is that all these concerns evaporate midway through the second episode, when the characters come into their own and stop with the Facebook meme-speak. Shorn of the relentless posturing, they emerge as real people.

It is about how black students on a mostly white campus react following a blackface party thrown by a student magazine.

Each episode returns to the blackface party, but then focuses on a character and takes the story forward as it replays earlier events in a different context, adding backstories and subplots to fill out what becomes engrossing viewing.

If there is a central character then it is the biracial Samantha White (Logan Browning), whose campus radio show, which gives the series its title, persistently rebukes white students for getting black people wrong.

So far, so so.

WATCH the trailer for 'Dear White People'

 

But where Dear White People improves is in the way it examines just how the black students get each other wrong, too.

Their conflicting views also come under scrutiny: who speaks for whom, how should they even speak, who is woke, who is not, and is it even safe for a black student to admit that he secretly watches Bill Cosby?

Some of it is close to home.

One student, the social-climbing Coco (Antoinette Robertson), seems concerned with being accepted by rich whites. She berates Samantha for being oblivious to her "light-skin privilege", but unknown is that Samantha has a white boyfriend.

This provocative series is as much a romcom as it is about principles.

This article was originally published in The Times.

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