The outdated title for the Sundance Film Festival hit Dope demonstrates today’s cultural retardation about race. Its story of a black high-school student, Malcolm (Shameik Moore), who wants to escape his California ghetto environment by selling drugs and going to Harvard, trades on a checklist of politically correct clichés: 1) a protagonist named after a political icon, 2) his black single-parent home, 3) his ethnically and sexually diverse Latino and lesbian best friends, 4) his gangbanging environment, 5) his drug-dealing antagonists, 6) nostalgic pop hits as musical score, and 7) Obama-worship.
For writer-director Rick Famuyiwa, a first-generation Nigerian American, these clichés are a pass to mainstream acceptance. Millennial audiences may no longer care about Nineties hip-hop, but Famuyiwa is aiming at behind-the-curve whites who are just catching on (thus, Sundance marveled at the word “dope,” which used to be hip-hop slang for “good” — decadently derived from old-time slang for drugs).
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