Dear White People was a sleeper hit that gained a following back in 2014. The film by Justin Simien has now been converted to a TV series that Netflix snatched up with urgency — for a good reason.
First off, the times call for a bold ushering of unabashed throttling towards all the reasons why being Black in America has afforded such anguish at the behest of those who commissioned themselves superior enough to mandate our misery.
The trailer is bold and spectacular. There is no question that the series will do exactly what it is needed to Trump what we can only describe as Trump’s America.
The White people who voted for our current nightmare seem to be up in arms about this new show — to the point of madness. Not long after the 30-second clip hit the internet — Twitter became the venue of choice for those of you who needed to vent about the “racist” and “anti-white” message embedded in an offering that was conceived for the exact same reasons that you willfully convey.
On the same day Dear White People started to trend— CNN’s Chris Cuomo was taken to task for poorly defending his right to report the facts above the threatening clout of “fake news.”
“I see being called ‘fake news’ as the equivalent of the N-word for journalists, the equivalent of calling an Italian any of the ugly words that people have for that ethnicity.”
I responded accordingly:
I also added a little something for those of you with a sweet tooth:
The question I had posed for others and myself was in the context of what we have tragically viewed as normal. We are comfortable with White men behaving badly. We accommodate the crippling consequences of a White wealthy man who became the president of the United States of America, and yet has no concept of what that title requires in even in the most basic sense. He is able to coerce his countrymen to abide by the rules that he is currently initiating without permission. He has turned this nation into an extension of a family business that is on the brink of bankruptcy.
He is a privileged asshole with tons of money and too much time on his hands. He waltzes through the streams of social media on behalf of everyone except the marginalized and the woefully encrypted. He has set the standard of what being White in America translates to — and as remarkably entertaining as this mess has been thus far — it’s beyond time for an extended intermission.
Dear White people, threatening to boycott Netflix for exercising the right to produce quality programming at the expense of dissolving your privilege won’t make you any whiter that you already are — but you can try.
Here’s the thing, Black people can’t ever be accused of racism because the very idea that a community that is continuously submerged under the filth of a mired past and problematic future, can somehow reclaim the disposition of entitlement against a system that was created for their dismemberment — is ludicrous.
White people that view a show that depicts their suffocating whiteness as an unfair assessment that warrants disciplinary action are enhancing their hue needlessly and shamelessly.
Your whiteness has never shielded us from the aftermath of a storm that rages during the times when you count yourselves as Americans while the rest of us struggle to scrape our loved ones from the pavement of death.
Your whiteness doesn’t scream through the streets as we battle the pain of our steps that are commanded by the streams of blood that leave footprints leading to the next victim who dies for the sake of being Black — while being White and right keeps the body count fatefully cohesive.
Your whiteness has never protected the Black man who once occupied the Oval Office from the deluge of insults that overwhelmed his official capacity even when he was the very best human draped in the Technicolor of hope and victory.
Your whiteness does very little to propel the steps of Black America and it’s children into the marketplace of wares that fit all sizes based on the landscape of humanity and equality.
Your privilege holds no power except for those who yearn to be rocked to sleep with the assurance that the last gasp of purity won’t be diluted by the reality of what the future holds — as races mix together with authority and pleasure.
Dear White people, take a peek at Dear White People and hold onto your prideful negligence and casual ignorance. You will absorb the meaning of what we are and what we will never be to each other.
And I promise that you won’t be any whiter than you already are — no matter how dark the screen gets.
