This weekend Netflix released the trailer for Dear White People. The 10 episode, half-hour series is an adaptation of the 2014 film, which was also written, directed, and produced by Justin Simien. Returning to the racially-tense campus of Winchester University, Simien picks up right where he left off: the characters protesting against a blackface party thrown at the end of the film.
The show expands upon the film by introducing a host of new personalities that land across the wide spectrum of young black identities– turning them into hilarious, but authentic, characters. There’s a character stumbling upon his queerness by typing into google questions like: “Does jerking off to superman make you gay?” Then there’s the ambitious student president, forced to find a way to gain favor among his fellow black and white classmates.
“In a lot of ways, my characters are going through a catharsis we are all kind of going through because they’re all, in some ways, reacting to the resistance,” Simien, who wrote the entire first season, told Buzzfeed in an interview. “Caring so deeply and passionately about something and having it not work out and blowing up in your face despite your best intentions, I needed to see a show about that. So I made one.”
In only two minutes the trailer touches on interracial dating, black queerness, class politics, and internalized racism. And, given the power of collective voices like Black Twitter, the unapologetically political show could not have come at a better time. The flurry of think pieces and tweets written in response to Jordan Peele’s Get Out earlier this year proved that black comedies could create a meaningful conversation about race among white and black viewers.
Dear White People will premiere on Netflix on April 28.