Described as “a satire about being a black face in a white place”, DWP is not the superficial slapstick minstrel-esque Black comedy popular on TV and in movies. Racial satire is risky and often fails in its effort to show the absurdity of racism when using the same stereotypes that perpetuate it in the first place. But, writer/director Justin Simien successfully incorporates humor without compromising the integrity of his critique. The humor ranges from the familiar gasp-I-can’t-believe-he-said-that-next-door-neighbor-racist faux pas to the I’m-hungry-but-should-I-get-the-fried-chicken everyday dilemmas.

DWP also contains layers of serious social critique on the paradoxes of identity construction, which I hope wasn’t lost on audiences of the non-CSRE variety. Simien obviously struggled with simplifying such a complex subject because he jammed it all into a nearly two hour-long frantic mess. The actors give dimensionality to their roles but their performance is muted by the intense focus you need to keep up with the storyline. Aside from the film’s dizzying pace, the character development was sometimes disjointed and underdeveloped, and a few of the plot twists were annoyingly predictable. However, it is hilarious and we haven’t had this good of a college-based racial satire since “School Daze”.

The film follows how students Sam, Coco, Lionel, and Troy negotiate conflicting identities to survive on the racially hostile campus of Winchester University – a fictional amalgamation of [insert all Privileged Predominantly White Universities here]. Sam is the leading Black radical voice and host of the college radio show “Dear White People” where she schools her White peers with the crispness of a quick slap to the face: “Dear White people, if you are dating a Black man just to piss off your father, you’re a racist”. Her equally sardonic pamphlet “Ebony and Ivy: a Survival Guide to Keep from Drowning in a Sea of White”, encapsulates the Du Boisian double consciousness afflicting the characters.

Coco, who changed her name because Colandrea wasn’t “resume-ready” and boasts how she’s only into White guys, plays the assimilating talented tenth sophisticate. Hardly the simple-minded self-hating trope, she is probably the film’s most complex character. A YouTube vlogger aspiring to be a reality TV star, she believes she needs the White gaze to become visible. For Whites to view her through a stereotyped lens, they’ll have to acknowledge her existence. – and she’ll play any role for the attention.

Troy is the overachieving “exceptional Black male”. He is under pressure to avoid being stereotyped that he can only be himself when he is alone in his suite or in the bathroom hiding from his White girlfriend. Politically ambitious, Troy eschews anything that could tarnish his public image, including his peers.

Lionel is the loner without a shtick. In one scene, he imagines himself approaching friends as the flamboyant gay black kid, then the masculine homeboy, and other 90’s Black sitcom stereotypes; but none of them feel right. While testing out different social spaces, he discovers how being gay and Black complicates his relationships.

Racial tensions climax when a frat throws a Blackface party (hmm…sounds familiar) and all the ethnic themed dorms storm the house. The Asian girl, responsible for uniting the dorms, pops up maybe twice as a ‘Hey! Remember race isn’t just Black and White!’ kind of PSA. Her presence reads as an afterthought tossed in to round up the other Others and move things along. Erasing other minority groups in a movie about representation is a perplexing irony I don’t believe Simien intended. But it’s there nonetheless –and it’s disappointing.