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The Women of "Dear White People"

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The recent Spirit Award nomination of Justin Simien’s Dear White People was a bright spot in my Twitter feed. In the month of Marion Barry’s death, Bill Cosby’s silence, and Lesley Brown’s stunned grief, the timing of the nomination couldn’t be better. Dear White People was born in moments like this one. Sam, the main character, began as a Twitter persona created by Simien. Her campus radio show (which shares the name of the film) seemingly follows Black Twitter’s conceit—that a combination of wit and anger will encourage white students at the elite university to do some soul-searching about their racism.

Like the members of Black Twitter, Simien’s main characters, Sam, Coco, Lionel, and Troy, are more concerned with the Black gaze than the white soul. Troy, the son of the school’s dean, feels pressured to be a credit to the race. His friendships and relationships are strategic, but the strategy is his father’s, not his own. Lionel is a self-proclaimed outcast who struggles to find a place to belong on campus. A gay fan of Star Trek, Lionel internalizes stereotypes about Black homophobia and hypermasculinity and thus avoids socializing with other Black students. In a touching turning point, Troy and Lionel connect as if seeing each other for the first time. As Lionel prepares to head toward the party that will change his relationship with the Black community, Troy tells him, “If I had been at your high school, I would have had your back.” Troy’s words are both a corrective to Lionel’s isolation and a promise to be fulfilled later in the film.

The missed opportunity of this film about building alliance is that Sam and Coco never get to experience such meaningful connection. As chosen leader of the Black Student Union (BSU), Sam is both a vehicle for the film’s critique of racism and a warning against the self-effacement that an entirely political identity requires. Sam’s acerbic wit masks a struggle with her own embodiment of racial harmony as the child of a Black mother and white father. Her ultra-Blackness seems to imperil her emotional health; her father is gravely ill, and Sam’s guilt complicates her worry. She confesses to Gabe, her white lover, that she used to reject her father in front of her Black friends. The secrecy of her relationship with Gabe follows this pattern. In a paternalistic scolding, he criticizes her secrecy and nationalist fervor as “tragic mulatta bullshit.” It is a telling misuse of the trope; the tragedy of this archetype is her alignment with whiteness, not Blackness.

Coco is actually the character most tragically aligned with whiteness. Coco is Sam’s foil, a mirror image of Sam’s struggles. While Sam confesses her childhood rejection of her father, Coco assimilates in order to reject parents that she thinks are too Black. She insults the real name they gave her, Colandrea, as “some ghetto-ass shit” and rolls her eyes at their “middle-class expectations.” She dons long, false hair and blue contacts.

At the film’s end (spoiler alert), both women are at odds with the BSU. Sam goes public with Gabe to the chagrin of glaring members of the BSU. When Troy disses Coco in public after sleeping with her, she blames the organization, which has by now expanded to include him and Lionel. Unfortunately, the credits roll before the newly outcast can find their way to each other.

In the spirit of fanfic, not deconstruction, I imagine a better way. What if Sam and Coco become the mirrors they each need to accept themselves?

Dear White People already suggests that reflection is a path to self-awareness. When Gabe criticizes Sam’s sensationalist film, he suggests that she “hold a mirror to the audience” instead of dropping a “panel on their heads.” In one of the film’s late turning points, Sam and Coco stare into their respective mirrors contemplating transformation. Sam unpins her usual hairstyle, which is reminiscent of early twentieth-century race women, and lets her loose curls fall to her shoulders. She accepts her hair’s texture, a marker of the biracial identity that has shamed her. In another room, Coco lifts her long, black wig off her head and replaces it with a blond one. She stares into her mirror with blue-tinted eyes. It is unclear whether the women see themselves or images coded by others’ expectations.

In Black Women, Identity, and Cultural Theory, literary theorist Kevin Quashie argues that mirrored selfhood, or “girlfriend subjectivity,” is one way that Black women define themselves in relationship to each other. Girlfriends see themselves in each other’s eyes and find respite from the isolation of being “black faces in white spaces.” A girlfriend’s mirror can be a source of personal liberation for Black women—a respite from the roles and expectations of them to be caretakers of white people and Black men.

Consider Quashie’s account of liberating girlfriend subjectivity in The Color Purple:

“Shug offers to Celie what she, Shug, sees, which is not precisely who Celie is (or what Celie might feel like) but is part of who/how Celie might be. Shug’s offering opens a door for Celie to think of herself as abundant and joy possessing. Her spoken reflection of Celie (she is Celie’s mirror) is strong enough to make an impression upon how Celie thinks of herself without reinforcing sexist and racist perceptions.”

As Simien’s characters illustrate, Black women don’t all mirror each other in healthy ways. Celie’s mirror was political and intentional, Walker’s own reflections on the potential of Black women to create safe spaces for each other. In times like these, we need to hold each other up. Quashie’s description of girlfriend subjectivity informs my fanfiction imagining of a more liberated Sam and Coco. In the spirit of Celie and Shug, my imagined characters take full advantage of the single moment in the film in which they meet each other’s gaze.

Sam is filming the melee of the hip-hop party-turned-riot when she sees Coco pushing her way through a horde of white partiers, her blond wig crooked. Instead of the confusing “They want to be us...” monologue of the original film, Coco is honest. She says, “I just wanted them to see me.”

Sam lowers her camera. “I see you.”

How do the accepted conventions of storytelling change when Black women characters actually see each other? Who are Sam and Coco’s “might be” selves? Who could they become in the intentional safety of each other’s eyes? Into what sunset could they walk together, two mirrors reflecting such incredible light? Finally, what future would make room for all they could become?

The timeliness of Dear White People’s Spirit Award nomination underscores the importance of imagining such a future.


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