It’s been a few months since a horde of mostly white, supremely foolish college students threw a blackface party (and were caught on camera), but “Dear White People” is no less timely for that. Such callous antics will likely continue. And more to the point, writer-director Justin Simien is far more interested in indicting our media culture, whose standardized and largely inaccurate images of black men and women arguably do a lot more damage to black psyches and representations than a few insensitively themed parties ever could.
College happens to be where many of the news-making blackface parties took place, but it turns out to be the perfect setting for the game of self-invention the film’s four African-American protagonists play as part of the traditional campus experience.