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Is DOPE the Blerd Movie We Need?

I’ve spent four years writing about life as a black nerd and analyzing pop culture through that lens, and now the moment of truth is here.

After being the joy of Sundance, Rick Famuyiwa’s teen comedy-drama Dope has been released upon the masses.
Dope stars the engaging Shameik Moore as Malcolm, the ’90s hip-hop-obsessed geek who’s down with computer coding, skateboarding, his punk band, perfect SAT scores and Harvard dreams while trying to survive life in the ’hood known as The Bottoms in Inglewood, Calif.
The chemistry between Malcolm and his friends, the polyracial geek Jib (Tony Revolori) and butch lesbian Diggy (Kiersey Clemons), feels honest, natural and provides some good comedy in the way you expect from teen movies.
The movie revels in its blerd bona fides: ’90s nostalgia, indie black artists, feeling not black enough for the cool kids in high school. Pharrell Williams throws in original songs, Forest Whitaker provides narration, Sean “Diddy” Combs is an executive producer.
So why, when the lights came back on, did I just not dig this movie?
I’m torn. I really am. I wanted to like Dope a lot. It has so much going for it, and so much I didn’t care for. Most likely I need to see it again, but as of now I don’t know what to make of it.
Part of it may be that Dope feels like a few different movies rolled into one, and they don’t all fit.

There’s the dope deal gone bad movie. The coming of age in the ’hood movie, which inevitably is a crime drama. The Very Important Race Message movie. The adolescent comedy movie, which often involves some version of a virginity movie featuring a girl as sex object – and that happens in Dope in gratuitous, scolding fashion. And there’s the morality of the afterschool special.

However, Dope does a good job of how tenuous life can be in the ’hood, a place where bad things happen indiscriminately at any time, where death can come for you simply for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. So many of Malcolm’s decisions in the movie come down to “do this or die.”
In these moments, the drama gels better, the movie flies easier as it flips between comedy of errors and tragedy of circumstance.
We’ve long had those race movies, with their gritty realism to place the unjust urban jungle as elucidation to white eyes and validation to black eyes. We had a boom of them in the ‘90s, including Boyz N The Hood, Menace II Society, and Fresh – a story about a young black boy caught in the drug trade of the ’hood.
With Dope, in case you couldn’t get the Very Important Race Messages, the movie throws them onto its mouthpiece character, Malcolm, who apparently is standing in for writer-director Rick Famuyiwa (The Wood, Brown Sugar), right down to a Nigerian surname.
Before Malcolm gets to speak about how he’s special in relation to racial expectations, the narrator makes sure to point out how Malcolm is a black nerd and stuff, and then largely disappears until it’s time to introduce the one white character, a slacker-hacker named Will (Workaholics’ Blake Anderson).
Sure, Dope could have just played out and you’d pick up how Malcolm is and what his life is like, but instead the movie’s gotta tell you, not show you.
“Look! Blacks are geeks too!” “They like indie ‘white people shit’ such as TV on the Radio and Donald Glover!”
But Dope won’t stop there. It’s ready to smash all the stereotypes and tell you it’s doing so, repeatedly.
“The geek becomes a gangsta!” “The movie’s gangsta is geeky about his hip-hop and knowledge of the ‘slippery slope’ concept!” “The rich fake-gangsta (aka a wanksta) pronounces soft C’s like B’s, saying ‘bereal’ in his rap!”
That boy licking the 2 Live Crew album cover of bethonged women? It’s a girl! Never met a “stud” – a butch, black lesbian – before? Well, now you have!
LOOK AT HOW MUCH THIS MOVIE IS UPENDING STEREOTYPES!
And furthermore, we’re confronted with someone who proves you can take the boy out of the ’hood, but you can’t take the ‘hood out of the boy. Malcolm outwits this man at his own game by combining his book smarts and street smarts for good instead of evil.
How can Malcolm pull this off? Because, as Malcolm straight-up tells his streetwise crush Nakia (Zoe Kravitz, looking like Poetic Justice-era Janet Jackson, doing a lot with little), he’s “not one of them niggas.”
Between the self-consciously downscale use of the N-word by Malcolm’s friends, to a drawn-out bit about Blake from Workaholics not being allowed to say it, Dope works so hard to downplay any affiliation to present-day, mainstream blackness to the point that their blerdery feels like a repudiation of blackness (or whites’ ideas of blackness) rather than celebrating one of many versions of blackness in their panoply.
If the movie didn’t spend so much of its time setting up Malcolm as an inward-directed “not one of them niggas,” maybe his spoken-word LOOK I’M DEFYING STEREOTYPES Harvard admissions essay near the end of the film wouldn’t have rung hollow with me.
Yes, you can string Malcolm’s alternative blackness together with the racism and white supremacy that turns black people into a monolith, and forces them into neighborhoods such as The Bottoms. Malcolm’s meetings with check cashing mogul Austin Jacoby (Roger Guenveur Smith, a high priest of black art as uplift) could have depicted those dichotomies of living while black and achieving access to halls of power such as the Ivy League.
But we don’t get much of that, as most of the movie lives on without an active white gaze and larger social critique. We get the school guidance counselor, who’s black, telling Malcolm that he’s arrogant for wanting to send an admissions essay that’s a fan theory on what day was depicted in Ice Cube’s song “Today Was A Good Day.” (Which sounds like an awful idea for a college essay, by the way, especially after Cube himself dispelled all theories back in 2012.)
In a fit of pique after the drama that drove the plot is very tidily wrapped up, we get Malcolm literally standing at a microphone telling Harvard’s admissions office that they wouldn’t expect this poor black kid from Inglewood to be a nerd, play punk rock, skateboard, but to be a drug dealer statistic, when – SURPRISE – he’s both! In trying to confront stereotypical views of blackness both inside and outside the race, Malcolm is positioned as a Special Negro. He’s “not one of them niggas”!
How this all comes together into one message, I can’t tell you.
Maybe this movie didn’t impress me so much because I’ve lived a good chunk of these dichotomies. I was a teenage black nerd in the ’90s that Malcolm, Diggy and Jib revere. Malcolm might not have liked being called Urkel all the time like I was back then.
I spent one half of my childhood in the ’hood during the 1980s crack epidemic from which my parents worked hard to shelter my brother and me. I spent the other half in a mixed neighborhood on the outskirts of Philadelphia and wound up at a predominately white preparatory school in the suburbs.
I went to Harvard, too. Those four years were spent navigating new pitfalls of bigotry while trying to finish growing up, and coming home a changed person worried about being seen as a sellout by fellow blacks or the target of a thousand you-think-you’re-better-than-mes from whites.
It also was an awesome time of studying deeply with social analysis, black American literature, liberation philosophy and black feminism with some the nation’s premier academic minds. Thanks to Harvard, I worked with some amazing artists, whether through the Kuumba Singers, the Harvard Black Arts Festival and spoken word performance. And it was a place where I engaged with all kinds of super-intelligent, super-amazing black people, and a place to which I return to cheer on my friends working on the place from the inside.
All that happened at Harvard, considered such a hallmark of whiteness that Dope throws up there more as a concept than anything else – consider it The Tops, a polar opposite of Malcolm’s The Bottoms neighborhood.
This is my 100th Blerd Vision column. I have spent the past four years writing about my experiences as a black nerd as related to pop culture, or living out diversity within diversity. I hope that I have made this space not into a lecture about upending stereotypes both within my race and without, but exploring the multiplicity of my identities and backgrounds.

I hope I trust you, the reader, enough to get what I am saying by showing you my life and views, not simply telling you.
Dope tells you, and tells you, from its overwrought narration that doesn’t need to be there, to the “them niggas” comments, to Malcolm’s boasty manifesto.
When Malcolm says, “Why do I want to go to Harvard? Would you ask me that if I wasn’t black?” a pair of black women sitting next to me in the theater snapped their fingers in preaching-to-the-choir approval against Harvard the straw man-for-The Man.
But I rolled my eyes.
That’s not an unfair question at a college interview. I’ve interviewed Harvard applicants, and I’ve asked that question. You want to know what someone, with their skills and abilities and smarts, specifically wants out of Harvard. It’s kinda helpful.
Is Famuyiwa saying that Harvard doesn’t take ’hood kids? Yes, Harvard and select private colleges definitely underrepresent in a major way recruiting students from poor and working-class backgrounds. Yet even at Harvard, those black ’hood kids were many of my classmates and friends.
And while my experience may not be all that typical, I am no Special Negro.
All that said, regardless of how torn I am about Dope, I’m still glad it got made.
I want more movies hitting the mainstream like Justin Simien’s Dear White People, or Dee Rees’ Pariah and Bessie: films that depict the diversity of life among people of color while also telling a good, compelling story. And that would include movies starring blerds, about blerds, by blerds.
Dope didn’t really hit the mark for me.

Ultimately, I didn’t know its message or its target, except to yell, “We’re not all the same.” In these times, conversations about race can be more sophisticated than that; mine are every day, even with folks who aren’t as conscious/knowledgeable on race stuff.

It had the feel of 42-year-old Famuyiwa trying to say something profound about blackness in the 21st century, but using 20th-century vocabulary.

But, hey, it’s a start.

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