INTERVIEW: “Dear White People’s” Justin Simien Scoffs At The Fake Mad Netflix Outrage
Originally posted on HipHopDX 5/4/2017
For Justin Simien, his path to Hollywood has been one mired in the kind of racism you would expect a black man to experience. After the success of his acclaimed and highly publicized movie Dear White People, Simien has followed it up with a show of the same title on Netflix. While the show currently has a perfect rating on the notoriously critical Rotten Tomatoes, Simien discusses how that path hasn’t always been so kind to him.
“[I experienced backlash] from day one,” Simien recalls during his recent segment on #DXLive. ‘The thing is [that] I incorporated it all into the movie. Anything negative people said, any knee-jerk reaction people had literally verbatim, their words are in the movie. Because, to me, that’s all a part of it. The fact that as a black artist I have to endure the knee-jerk [reactions] from the majority? That’s kind of what I’m talking about here. ‘Stuff White People Like’ I don’t remember that getting backlash [and] I don’t remember seeing people protest Stephen Colbert’s ‘Hey White People’ but because it’s a black guy saying the words white and people together, I don’t know, that just freaks people out.”
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