“Dear White People”...
Some of you will be familiar with that title.
Others who haven’t heard about the new American satire being launched in April 2017 on Netflix, may just think that it’s this post trying to be controversial. It’s actually the first words of a monologue from a series of the same name.
Here, we’re going to talk about the new TV show which has split the opinion of Netflix subscribers across the world.
The issue began in February of this year, when the trailer for Dear White People was first aired by the giant entertainment network. The show attempts to satirise the perceptions of American minorities.
After the trailer was shown, Netflix had one of the largest unsubscription spikes they have ever experienced. Roars of ‘anti-white’ cries were heard across social media platforms, and the fire began.
As we all know however, the world of entertainment and social media feedback is a hydra with infinite heads, which grows regardless of whether you attack or appease it.
In the end, you feed it just the same. In this case, it’s very unlikely that the show’s writer and director Justin Simien is losing any sleep.
To play devil’s advocate, we can always refer to Oscar Wilde’s comment which is still true today:
"There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."
The show is finding allies among the majority of mainstream entertainment news. Plus, as we all know, the minds behind this series knew exactly what the reaction was going to be, even from the title alone.
Creative professionals are masters of pathos, and initial controversy is like a golden handshake to them.
It’s also worth mentioning that not everyone in the world can watch the same titles on Netflix. Did you know that some countries can only view around 11% of the material available on the American version? If you have a subscription outside of the U.S., you can remedy this in a few minutes however, with a site like http://www.flixusa.com.au.
News.com.au suggests that Dear White People is not arrogant, and ‘It’s simply asking the questions.’, which is a well balanced way of looking at things.
Another question we can ask overall is: are angles that create any type of vitriol ever going to help resolve racial issues? Probably not. A direct way to examine this question is to have some fun changing the word ‘white’ in the title. For example:
Dear Black People...
Dear Hispanic People...
Dear Females...
Dear Males...
One of the most bizarre – but rarely spoken about – facets of the modern era, is how fashionable it still is to incite a negative emotional reaction, instead of a reflective and intelligent one, since these three siblings are often not in the same house at the same time.
A much better way to satirise a topic like American racial culture, would be to satirise the game itself, like a person creating a painting of an artist at work.
The old: mirror of a mirror concept. If we had more mainstream entertainment media that used it, we might even start to do the most terrible of things, and resolve the issues that get reheated every time we see something that we don’t like.
Another thing we all know is that satire is one of the sharpest weapons in the creative armoury, and that it can have an even more powerful effect than non-fictional material.
That isn’t to say that a show called Dear White People begins on an ethically questionable footing, this is just how professional creatives pay the bills.
So only time will tell if it’s able to go beyond the satirisation of clichéd behaviour (which is an easy target), flip the vanity mirror around, and satirise: itself, as it plays the race game.
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