The new documentary White People opens with the journalist Jose Antonio Vargas approaching white people on the street and telling them he’s “doing a film for MTV on what it means to be young and white.” Each person giggles a bit. To them, the premise, on its face, seems funny.
But it was groans, not giggles, that greeted the news in November that MTV had put out a casting call that asked questions like “Are you being made to feel guilty because you’re white?” and “Are you having a problem with race on social media?” It sounded like a Breitbart.com reporter fishing for a follow-up to the Shirley Sherrod story—an attempt to make it seem as though white people were victims of an increasingly diverse nation, even as headlines keep reminding Americans that race divisions still harm the same people that they have always harmed in this country.
In the days before White People aired, though, professional critics started airing a different kind of disapproval of the project. The consensus seems largely to be that, in the words of Willa Paskin at Slate, the film’s “a little too remedial with and gentle on, well, white people.” The headline for Ken Tucker’s Yahoo reviewread, sarcastically, “Race Privilege Exists, MTV Discovers.”
[For more of this story, written by Spencer Kornhaber, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/ent...ns-privilege/399302/]
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