What is it with You People?
Dominic Green
Netflix’s racial rom-com You People is the most interesting film of the year so far and a document of our times. Like propaganda and socialist realism, You People is politics masquerading as art. Its politics is a fantasy: the racial hierarchy of identity politics. Its art may be limited in rom and light on com, but its divergence from reality reveals why that motor of progressive history, the multihued, multiculti, highly paradoxical Democratic coalition, is stuttering.
Ezra Cohen (Jonah Hill) and Amira Mohammed (Lauren London) are young Los Angeles zoomers. She was raised in the Nation of Islam, and he is a Reform Jew. Her parents disapprove because he is white, his parents approve because she is black. The couple fall in love, their parents break them up, the parents repent, and the race-cross’d lovers marry. It’s not exactly Shakespeare, though it does have more in common with Romeo and Juliet than Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner.
The Jews in You People are rich, white, ultraliberal, and sexually perverse. They are adroit at economic string-pulling but blind to realities beyond their own liberal bubble. The blacks see themselves victims of racial and economic discrimination. They are homophobic and so unhinged by their resentment of whites that they cite antisemitic conspiracy theories at dinner. Both families are self-absorbed, obsessed with victimhood, and hypersensitive to offense.
The co-writers, Hill (who is Jewish) and his director, Kenya Barris (who is black), cannot sustain the premise of Capulet-Montague equivalency. Woke America does not believe in the equality of people. It believes in collective “equity” and racial hierarchy as a moral hierarchy. Most of the negative reaction to You People, especially from Jews, has focused on its failures of equivalency. The blacks are cool, the Jews are not. Ezra jokes about the Holocaust, but Amina joins her family’s outrage when Ezra’s mother compares the Holocaust to African slavery. The failure of equivalency is the point. How else can a racial hierarchy be affirmed?
Beyond the competitive victimology, the lovers are made for each other. Ezra and Amina each have semi-jobs, as a “culture” podcaster and Etsy-style designer, respectively. She went to Howard, and he must have attended an even more prestigious college because he is even more ignorant. Neither can see beyond the other’s skin color, and both are bacon-eaters with little interest in religion. Their real shared passion is for rap, sneakers, and shopping. Their wokeness is aspirational, homogenized, and performative.
Their families also have more in common than they realize. The Cohens are run by a domineering mother, the Mohammeds by a domineering father. Both families follow only-in-America religions that are heavy on the politics of social justice and light on the intellect. Reform Jews and adherents to the Nation of Islam often leave their putative co-religionists, both in the United States and in the Old World, somewhere between bemused and embarrassed. Ezra’s parents hide in a liberal fantasy land and struggle to articulate why the Mohammeds’ fondness for Louis Farrakhan is immoral. Amira’s parents, Akbar and Fatima, hide in ahistorical fantasies of cosmic white evil. Neither family’s identity is authentic enough to transmit its values to the next generation. Akbar, his ne’er-do-well brother reminds him, is really called Woody.
Reform Jews and the Nation of Islam are the most and least liberal elements in the Democratic coalition. Their identities as crusaders for post-racial liberalism and crusaders for racial separatism coalesced in the ’60s and have fossilized since then. Their political icons are Bernie Sanders (age 81) and Louis Farrakhan (age 89). The parents in You People talk like boomers, but they are actually the children of boomers. As in political life, the intervening cohort, Generation X, has become a silent generation.
Meanwhile, in real life, Reform Judaism and the Nation of Islam are losing their claims to represent their respective communities. The demographic and intellectual dynamism of American Jews is swinging to the Orthodox and the right. And the Nation of Islam remains a minority taste. In 2017, Pew Research found that 1% of African Americans are Muslims, with only 2% of that 1% following the Nation of Islam. Overall, black Muslims comprise only a fifth of America’s Muslim population.
The decline in anti-black and anti-Jewish discrimination since the ’60s has allowed both groups to move up into the kind of affluence that the Cohens and Mohammeds enjoy in You People. In the process, the Cohens and the Mohammeds have become more like each other. High rates of out-marriage mean American Jews are getting browner and blacks are getting lighter. A 2020 study from Reform Judaism found that in 2017, 13% of Jews in the San Francisco Bay Area and 12% in the New York City area were “Jews of Color.” In the same year, Pew Research reported that marriages between blacks and non-blacks had risen from 5% in 1980 to 18% in 2017.
The economic difference between the Cohens and the Mohammeds is that between the upper-middle and the middle-middle. This is enough to infuriate Akbar, for Amina to joke about getting her hands on some of Ezra’s ill-gotten “generational wealth,” and for her mother, Fatima, to claim the Jews got a head start in America because they ran the slave trade. Freud, not a slave trader, would have called this pathological and also the “narcissism of small difference.” But small difference matters when the politics of race is also the politics of redistribution, which is a command economy of victimhood.
The film’s resolution leaves much of this unresolved. Ezra’s mother apologizes for her well-meaning crassness, but she also volunteers a bizarre self-abnegation “on behalf of all Jewish people,” which appears to confirm the Mohammeds’ Farrakhanist fantasies about Jews. Meanwhile, Amina’s father apologizes only for his bossiness — not his sexism or his family’s antisemitism and conspiracism, let alone on behalf of all black people. The movie ends with a marriage but not with Akbar reassessing his hateful and false beliefs. He is speaking his racial truth, and it must stand, even if it is malicious crackpottery.
You People is not a comedic exaggeration. It’s not that funny, for one thing, and its racial politics are not an exaggeration. The film is an accurate reflection of how the Democrats, the elite educational establishment, most of the media, and even major corporations claim to understand American history and the rights of grievance that it confers in the present day. It is a dismal and unsustainable way to live. It is also divorced from social reality.
The political message might not be the one Hill and Barris have in mind. You People shows why people feel race relations are worsening, even as the rate of racial mixing rises. A party that insists on imposing an unworkable racial rubric on an increasingly interracial society will be rebuffed by reality at the ballot box. A party that defends the rights of people and welcomes all-comers will be rewarded.
Dominic Green is a columnist for the Washington Examiner and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Follow him on Twitter @drdominicgreen.