Dear White People

Sam makes a student film that is critical of what she sees as white people's widespread fear of Barack Obama and titles it "Rebirth of a Nation." This is a reference not only to D.W. Griffith's notoriously racist 1915 Civil War movie The Birth of a Nation (1915) but also to something that filmmaker Spike Lee experienced while he was a first-year student at NYU's graduate film school. After being required to watch Griffith's film and objecting to the fact that his professors taught it only as a milestone in the technical development of cinema with no attention paid to its racism and its legacy of helping to relaunch the KKK, Lee made a student short film titled The Answer (1980) that responded to The Birth of a Nation himself. "The Answer" so offended many of his NYU professors that Lee was nearly expelled from NYU, but was ultimately saved by a faculty vote.

The invitation for the party as shown in the trailer is almost verbatim the invitation for a real life party that occurred at the University of California, San Diego, on February 15th, 2010. The synopsis and film take many cues from the UCSD "Compton Cookout," an event run by one African American but attended by UCSD's predominately white and Asian student body. The event itself went fine, but news about it prompted a massive uproar on campus.

Producer Lena Waithe and writer-director Justin Simien met in a scriptwriter's group. Despite the fact that the script was over 200 pages long, Waithe was so impressed with Simien's writing that she told him if he could figure out a way to streamline the script she would produce it, despite having never produced a film before.

Sofia derisively tells Coco that she knows to ask whether or not Coco's hair is "weaved" because she had to watch Chris Rock's 2009 documentary Good Hair (2009) for a class. When Dear White People was released on DVD, the first trailer that appeared in front of the movie was for Good Hair.

The theme of the frat party exhibiting blatant racism, parallels the Martin Luther King Day celebration that took place at Arizona State University in January 2014.