The Creator of Dear White People Wants to Tell You the Complicated Truth About America

Even with the flood of shows and movies available to you with a Netflix subscription, there really isn't anything on the service like Dear White People. An unapologetic satire of an American culture that thinks it's post-racial, the series uses its fictional Ivy League college, Winchester University to—witheringly, hilariously, furiously—show that it is not. With Volume 2 of the series, which premiered last weekend, Dear White People swings even bigger and lands even harder: Its comedy is funnier, its visual construction is more layered and ambitious, and its critiques are sharper than ever.

It's so good that GQ had to catch up with series creator Justin Simien to talk about a season of television that explores the alt-right, the secret history of America, and how incredibly good a year it's been for black artists.

GQ: You've talked about one of your goals with Volume 2 being to tell more complicated truths—do you think there's an upper limit to that, or are you probing it now?
Justin Simien: I think I'm probing that now, but it's so exciting to see that I'm not the only one probing that. I was so excited to see what Donald Glover did over the weekend, using his SNL appearance to put out this amazing piece of work, and seeing someone like Janelle Monae coming out as pansexual and basing an entire album release around it. Seeing what Lena Waithe is doing with The Chi—you know, I'm not just naming these names, these are people I've admired, I've been friends with, and it feels nice to be part of a community where we all are reaching for the parameters together. It doesn't feel like I'm the only one anymore. I don't think there's any limit to art that has white people in it, so why should there be a limit to stories about the rest of us.

Do you feel emboldened now to reach for a level of specificity you couldn't before?
Yes I feel so emboldened, I feel so inspired right now, I really, really do. We put a lot into this season, and to see it being received, to see it being picked apart, to see people freaking out over it is exciting. But to see other artists doing things that two years ago, five years ago, would be unheard of—and doing it regularly—it's like every few weeks there's a thing! Beychella, Kendrick wins a Pulitzer—it's so exciting. I feel like, finally! All of those amazing ideas and concepts that I flirted with as an artist when I went to theater school, studying playwrights and studying film—finally, for creators of color, there's runway now for us to explore those arenas.

Because so often we're the only ones telling our stories, so we have to stay within certain parameters, so people will get it, so it'll be marketable, so it's not asking too much of the audience. I feel like those boundaries are falling away and it's really freeing.

You get at some really tough questions in Volume 2, particularly in Sam's story—she has to deal with the question of what the endgame of her activism is, or what will make her feel like she no longer has to advocate for her personhood or fight against the trolls.
I think something that's so wild is how common it is. It's called trolls now, but it's been a thing since African slaves were freed, there has been a concerted effort to somehow extract work and culture from these people but not to allow them a voice in the conversation about what happens to them. Baldwin would say white people reconciled with the trauma that they inflicted upon their brothers. People who have every right to be called citizens being treated like cattle—how do you collectively deal with the guilt over that? And he posited that you have to turn these people into animals, you have to invent Jim Crow, invent the nigger, invent pickaninny, invent all of these ideas other than "human beings," so that their voices don't really matter as much as yours and it's okay to treat them this way.

I think a lot of folks have seized upon that propensity in this country and have made a lot of decisions because of it. There's that sort of new Jim Crow talk about how, during the Nixon era, when Martin Luther King started to talk about the poor, and the working class, and how as much of an issue as race is, he was talking about, "Well why do we want to integrate into a burning house? Shouldn't we fix the house?"

Can you go into that a little more?
I think what he saw as the problem with the house was income disparity, and the things that we're talking about now. But the thing that they discovered during the Nixon administration was that if the white working class helps the black working class to be just like them, then you have a working class that is absolutely unstoppable. So there was a political reason to have the "war on drugs," which I hope everyone can see was just a war on black people. The opioid crisis is treated like a crisis and not a war. You have a whole generation of people who grew up without their dads because they were incarcerated over holding pot, and those kids have to watch as white hipsters open pot stores, and are celebrated for doing the same thing. It's kind of a hoax. It's fake news that we all fell for hundreds of years ago in this country. It's taken so much to wake up from that dream.

So yeah, it does suck that there's this concerted effort to silence me, but also I have it really good compared to the people that came before me. And I never forget that, I never forget what an opportunity this is, so while I have the time, I'm just gonna try to make the most of it, because so few people before us have had that opportunity, you know?

There are also a lot of progressive white people out there who like to align with people of color and say "this is fucked up" but stop short of taking direct responsibility. How do you deal with that?
Part of it is because we all want to buy into this American Dream that we actually live in a meritocracy where we earned everything because we worked hard for it. We've been taught that since we were children. So you suddenly tell a group of people, "Well, actually there's some things you didn't work hard for, because they were given to you" and people don't know what to do with that, you know? I think Chuck Hayward, who wrote this line in Reggie's episode, really put it in a brilliant way. He wrote for Reggie to say, "Just like if your dog bites somebody—you didn't bite them. Obviously, you did not bite that person. But you are responsible. And racism is like white people's dog." You didn't create it, you didn't make the system, but you grew up in it, you benefited from it, and it was made for you, it was made by people who look like you. And for better or worse, you are the only ones who can actually dismantle it, because the way it's designed, people of color don't have any say. The system is kept alive by the people kept in power, which is white people.

I understand not quite being able to acknowledge that and square that away with how you've always thought of yourself, but it's very important to do so. More and more we can articulate how racism, which stems from the invention of whiteness in the 17th and 18th centuries, actually affects everybody. I think the Trump presidency was a big eye-opener for white straight male liberals, because for the first time we saw a direct link between racism against black people and global chaos. It puts a mad king in power, this thing called racism. The reaction to, what was in every regard, a great president who happened to be black, was so strong it put an insane person in power. And you can't link it to anything but racism. And we can finally see in a very clear way, "Oh, this is how this affects everybody." And by the way, it's always affected everybody, but now we can see it better. Any country where a large portion of its citizens are silenced or put behind bars yet are expected to do so much is a country that is waiting to fail.

Much of Volume 2 has the students of Winchester dealing with an alt-right internet troll that's ultimately revealed to not be a white person, but Silvio, the gay latino student journalist. I'm fascinated by that decision, because while I'm not white, I'm deluding myself if I think it's impossible for me to go down that rhetorical road.
Nobody think they're capable of that—so many people who didn't think they were capable of that became that anyway. Part of it is human nature, and because there isn't a white straw man at the end of that, the villain is really the system. The system in which Silvio feels he has to make these decisions in order to get ahead, or to somehow make sense of what he's feeling. I don't think he's blameless, mind you, but when it's not a white person on the other end, it's not so easy to figure out who to blame, or what to blame. And I think it helps get to a truth that is really important to understand, which is: racism is not about white people having an attitude towards black people. That's not racism.

It's the fact that white people have more power in this country, in ways that maybe they're not willing to acknowledge, but they do. So those attitudes about black people become policy, and infrastructure decisions, and they become housing decisions, and they become education decisions, and they become income decisions—that actually leads to a disenfranchisement of a whole swath of people based on something so arbitrary as your bias. And I think it's more complicated than stop saying this or don't use this word or stop appropriating culture. It's way more complicated than that. Racism describes power plus prejudice, not just prejudice. And we are taught about it incorrectly as children. A lot of people think racism is just like, you're offended by something someone says. But being offended is not the same as being systemically held down, and we have to acknowledge that. This country was founded in slavery, and we must acknowledge that wound if we are to really do what I think everyone hopes this country is destined to do in the future, which is to lead and to bring about a more progressive society.

Let's wrap up with Gabe, the white Winchester student who spends much of Volume 2 trying to make a well-meaning documentary called Am I Racist? There's a conversation in the eighth episode about Gabe profiting from his white guilt—how do you approach and handle the optics of an outsider wanting to do something, but also putting themselves in a position to benefit from it?
It's a really hard conundrum. There's a lot of pain in the black community, there's a lot of triggering and reaction that like, what else are we gonna do? We've been conditioned to be that way because we've been shat upon by society. But what is [Gabe] to do, then? What is it that we want this guy to do, how do we want him to be an ally? And I thought it was very interesting to put them in a room and for them to both be right. For them both to be so right that it doesn't matter anymore. Because at the end of the day, there's two people that want to be together. I think we all want to be together. I actually think that, the idea that human beings are inherently selfish and self-interested; I think that's just a capitalist kind of ideal projected onto humanity. I think we actually like being in community, and I think we like being friends with each other, that we like being close to each other.

We have all these conversations about being right that's keeping us from just being together. I wanted you to care very much about the arguments that they're making, but ultimately what I wanted you to care more about was whether or not they're gonna work this out, whether or not they're gonna do this. I wanted that to sort of have nothing to do with the arguments that they were making at all. And almost have it be like, once they stop trying to be right, then they can start to see each other as people and start to maybe move forward. It's a hopeful vision—but not that hopeful because immediately calamity befalls Sam. But it's the kind of argument I wish we could have, but we can't because we're bound by 140 characters and our social media brands, and our presence and thinkpieces we have to keep churning out to get clicks, positioning ourselves as the voice of this or that. All of this shit gets in the way of doing what I feel like is most natural to us, which is to collaborate, and be in community.