Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

At the fictional Ivy League Winchester University, a student named Sam White hosts a campus radio show called Dear White People, and a blackface party blows the campus open. The film follows four Black students working out who they are in a place that wants them to be one thing. A campus satire played straight, with sharp jokes and no easy heroes.

Why it’s here: The film takes the 'post-racial' campus story and shows how every Black student is asked to perform one version of themselves. What's punk is that the satire turns on its own heroes too. What's pedagogical is the vocabulary it gives you: code-switching, respectability, who gets to define blackness. It sits next to Sorry to Bother You in the catalog.

Pierre Delacroix, a Black TV writer, pitches a modern minstrel show as a deliberate insult to get fired, and the network loves it. It becomes a hit, and the satire spins out of his control. It was shot on digital video and is one of Lee's most uncomfortable films.

Why it’s here: The film turns the lens on who profits from caricature and who agrees to wear it. What's punk is that Lee refuses to make it comfortable: the audience laughing is the target. What's pedagogical is media literacy in its harshest form: how a joke becomes a product, and how the person making it stops being able to say no. It contains harsh imagery by design. Pairs with Sorry to Bother You and Network.