“Dear White America, congratulations, you’ve ruined the ‘Single Ladies’’ dance.”

I chuckled at the IM from a close friend, a white friend, as we attempted to stave off boredom at our respective day jobs. It was 2009, and youtube was flooded with girl scout troops, sororities, inmates, you name it doing their version of Beyonce’s iconic video and thus sapping it of its cool. Sending “Dear White America-isms” back and forth had become a snarky but satisfying past time initiated by my friend. During such an exchange it dawned on me that “Dear White America” would make a great name for the radio show hosted by firebrand Samantha White, a divisive fictional character in a screenplay I’d been writing called 2%

2%, which referred to the percentage of black students amongst the general population of a fictional Ivy League at the heart of my screenplay, was always a working title. The script was a multi-protagonist “Altman-esque” attempt to comment on race from differing points of views within a small black community embedded in an overwhelmingly white one. It was a way for me to express the everyday conundrums and challenges of being a “black face” in a “mostly white space.” A way to comment on the “black experience” as I knew it to be, but rarely saw reflected in the culture.

I waffled on whether or not to include a sequence where white students threw a “Nigga Night,” to dress up in black-face, drink forties and blast Ja-Rule. I wondered if I was taking the satire too far. Months after I’d decided to cut the scene I came across an article about just such an occurrence at UC San Diego. The scene was reintroduced and provided a fitting climax that I could now model after real world events as they unfolded. But the title had to go. “Number titles” never worked, I’d been told, assisting in the publicity department at Focus Features. 2% was too nondescript. This film needed something…louder.

College students enjoying a “Compton Cookout”

I’d seen fantastic black filmmakers make fantastic films about the black experience take their work all the way to Sundance only to have it fall into cultural obscurity afterwards. There were exceptions of course, but nuanced, complicated depictions of black people were not terribly en vogue in 2009. I knew that whatever I called it, I had to break through the clutter. Like my hero Stanley Kubrick, I sought to not simply tell bold stories, but to ensure that eyes were laid upon those stories, even if that took some provocation.

I idolized Kubrick for having the perseverance to make unflinching masterwork after masterwork despite audiences and critics not quite being ready for them. A Clockwork Orange had survived vicious headlines accusing it of stoking violence to become a classic. 2001 A Space Odyssey had defied utter befuddlement by critics to become regarded as one of the greatest films ever made. (It happens to be my favorite film ever.)

Kubrick and Malcolm McDowell filming A Clockwork Orange

A picture of Kubrick, along with Spike Lee, Bob Fosse, Michael Jackson and of course Oprah Winfrey watched over me from a vision board above the computer where I wrote in my tiny Korea-town studio apartment. They reminded me of what I wanted my work to achieve.

As I began fleshing out Sam’s voice as well as the mechanics of her controversial radio show, now the catalyst for all the drama in a more recent draft of 2%, I thought to start an anonymous twitter account in order to test out quips as well as study reactions to something called “Dear White America” and incorporate them into the script. After searching and realizing Dear White America was already a thing (a brilliant book by white essayist Tim Wise hoping to speak to white anxiety in the age of Obama) I landed on Dear White People, which conveniently fit without abbreviation as a twitter handle.

The Dear White People account was met positively by the dozens who noticed it. I prided myself on avoiding low hanging fruit and strove to provide dual commentaries as often as possible. That was not exactly the model other, more viral, joke accounts followed but it was something I felt was true to Sam’s style of expression.

Early Dear White People tweet

Things picked up when a tweet thanking white people for Mayer Hawthorne and inquring if we could swap him out for professional reality villain Omarosa, got lots of likes and a comment from the singer himself, upping the follower count. There were some tweets that miffed people, to be sure. But even those gave me real world perspectives to put into the mouths of my characters.

Coco side-eyes nemesis Sam White in Dear White People film

The line “Dear White People is nothing more than blacker than thou propaganda” which the character Coco would retort to Sam in the final draft, came from such a reply, along with other lines and plot shifts. “What if there was a Dear Black People?” is asked (and answered) by a character within the script’s first five pages.

By 2011, I’d seen Stuff White People Like and Shit White Girls Say go through tremendously popular viral cycles online, unscathed by the controversy they stirred up. In fact any controversy only seemed to re-enforce their popularity. It occurred to me that by naming the film itself Dear White People I could tap into the burgeoning meme culture as well as make a meta-commentary about the controversies within the film.

As a title it felt right for other reasons too. It was a clutter buster, the kind of thing that made you sit up and go “What is THIS going to be?” Perhaps naively I assumed that most people would move quickly past their knee jerk reaction, whatever that may be, take a look at my little art film about the lives of black students, and either be surprised or validated by seeing themselves in characters mostly absent from popular culture. It also worked for me as a title, because the radio show of the same name (providing a subtle double meaning as Samantha’s last name is ‘White’) within the film also draws both ire and praise from the black community at my fictional Ivy League. Whether or not such a show was racist was a central question the characters grappled with.

In addition to that rationale, before one had even seen the film, the title immediately invited a discussion about what racism even is. If I hurt your feelings by making a joke about white people, does that count as racism because I’m black, or because it offended you? Is a white person mocking black people the same thing? Furthermore, is racism synonymous with prejudice? Or, as Beverly Tatum asserts in her groundbreaking book Why Do The Black Kids Sit Together in the Cafeteria is racism something else altogether?

“Prejudice plus [the] power” to enforce that prejudice upon others through a system of disadvantage, Tatum asserts, is what defines racism as separate from bigotry, prejudice or plain insults based on race. It was a point of view Sam White, I thought would certainly have.

A show called Dear White People forced the characters in the film (as well as audiences) to ponder these questions alongside an uncomfortable feeling that their very identities may essentially be mere responses to mainstream white culture’s preconceptions of them. What a mind-fuck being black could be in what was still being called “Post-Racial America.” The title felt appropriate on virtually every criteria I could come up with.

Finally the title worked the way some of my favorites did. Titles like A Clockwork Orange or Naked Lunch or There Will Be Blood were flashing beacons among more typically titled films. Audiences and critics didn’t seem to mind the title mis-leads. Their attention had been captured and then focused upon novel subjects often under-explored.

“This kind of thing worked for other film auteurs, why shouldn’t it work for me?” I thought.

Sure enough the self funded concept trailer I created to raise money for the film went viral, thanks in part to it’s title, and set me on a path to finance and create my ambitious attempt at a debut feature. The outrage and claims of “reverse racism” the video inevitably received hardly outweighed the excitement it generated, and in fact it shined a light on the need for such a movie in the minds of fans.

The cast of the original Dear White People concept trailer

This was 2012. Four years before the end of President Obama’s second term.

One of the first comments the concept trailer received was “What are you complaining about? This isn’t the sixties, it’s 2012. Do we really need a movie like this?”