Dear White People offers a bleak, and largely dramatized, image of reality in a country divided on the issue of race. While the issues revolving race, segregation, and cultural appropriation in elite college institutions are very real, this movie ignores any nuance and subtlety surrounding the issues, thus delegitimizing the problems are fueling the arguments of skeptics who believe that racism is dead. Certain parts of this movie create necessary discussion that needs to be central to any conversations involving progress in America.
For example, when she is leaving her film studies class, Sam references the commodification of black people in culture, specifically hip-hop and film. She argues that black people are incentivized to perpetuate stereotypes that are counterproductive to the advancement of black people in order to profit from a largely white fanbase. While these adverse incentives are notable and problematic, scenes like this one are overshadowed by examples of overt racism that are not nearly as prevalent as this movie would make them seem. In this sense, the perverse incentives that this movie criticizes are exactly what the producers are feeding in to. Dear White People exaggerates culturally controversial issues in order to drive box office ratings. Their attempts to condemn racism and racial inequities are overshadowed by an overt attempt to grow their profits.
I thought it was really interesting you pointed out this hypocrisy between what the film said and what they did, and agree that overt blackface parties, of which you are referring to, that the movie uses are rare but do occur. I think that instead of the film trying to grow their profits, it is simply demonstrating a possible result of a high-tension racist campus culture which has occurred at many universities
highlighting the fact that alot of this movie is dramatized is very important. However, I think the best point you made was that racial differences or prejudices are far more subtle than displayed in this movie. Here, on purpose, it makes a deliberate point of making these prejudices overtly obvious, but in real life they are often harder to notice, and thus harder to tackle and solve