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December 9, 2024

Chanel Dupree (Ep. 02, 2025)

By: John L. Hanson

This week on In Black America, producer and host John L. Hanson, Jr. speaks with Chanel Dupree, an award-winning screenwriter and director, whose recent documentary, You Think You Grown: Dismantling Adultification, which addresses issues of racial and gender stereotypes, specifically the societal perception of African American girls sexually and physically mature beyond their years.

The full transcript of this episode of In Black America is available on the KUT & KUTX Studio website. The transcript is also available as subtitles or captions on some podcast apps.

Chanel Dupree I was researching Rethinking World since 2016, and I made four projects, each with a documentary specifically. It takes so much time for research. It is articles, it’s journals, it’s books, podcasts. So many things that you’re consuming because unlike a narrative film or pilot, you write it and then shoot exactly what you wrote the documentary. You can have points of what you want to discuss, but you have to. It’s a puzzle and you have to slowly bring it together, even after production. And I feel like piecing the movie together how it should be. And so I knew that I wanted to build my portfolio. I also wanted to build my directorial voice and know what my directorial voice was, and I knew that I wanted to read a few more times before I got to this ground because I knew the impact that it needed. I knew the seriousness of need I needed and the focus that it needed.

John L. Hanson Jr. Chanel Dupree, founder of Artistic Laughter, production award winning screenwriter and director. Dupree recently produced and directed a documentary titled ‘You Think You Grown? Dismantling Adultification.’ The production highlights sociological possession of African-American girls as old and less innocent than their peers affected their lives in significant ways. This often stems from stereotypes that wrongly assume African American girls tend to go. Features are more in line with those of adults rather than children. In her film, Dupree shares how adultification affected her personally. Other women in the production describe extreme punishments in school, inappropriate attention from older men, and the negativity they receive from various sources, including teachers, peers and social media alongside sociological norms. I’m John L. Hanson Jr. and welcome to another edition of In Black America. On this week’s program, ‘You Think You Grown?’ with Chanel Dupree In Black America.

Chanel Dupree Slavery plays a huge, huge promise. Black children were never seen as children. Black girls were never seen as innocent from the moment they were born. They were cattle. They were workers. They were immediately there to help the business. And a beautiful, beautiful professor, oh God, in my documentary, she says that a lot of mothers had to prepare their daughters mentally and spiritually for rape. Let’s really sit with that. How do you prepare the mind, the body, the soul? The spirit? For it to be attacked by age ten, by age eight. These little girls were already in line to bear children.

John L. Hanson Jr. According to a new report released by Georgetown University, adultification of African-American girls is a common occurrence, beginning when they are five years old and continuing through age 19. African-American girls are viewed as more adult than their white counterparts, and this adultification happens for a reason dating back to slavery. African-American women have been stereotyped as Jezebel, the Sapphire and the Mammy. The report found that these stereotypes are alive and well today and shape our perceptions of African American girls as well as African-American women. In a documentary, ‘You Think You Grown? Dismantling Adultification,’ producer-director Chanel Dupree dissect the ways in which seemingly harmless a historical question has been posed to African American girls throughout history to control their behavior and diminish their self-worth. Recently In Black America spoke with Chanel Dupree.

Chanel Dupree I am a Brooklyn baby, born and raised in Brownsville, one of the hardest neighborhoods to get through. But it had a lot of love and a lot of community at times and living in such an integrated and beautiful and Black community like Brooklyn, it really shaped me as an artist, especially as a Black woman.

John L. Hanson Jr. Chanel, do you have any brothers and sisters?

Chanel Dupree no, I don’t. I’m an only child.

John L. Hanson Jr. I understand. When did you become interested in filmmaking?

Chanel Dupree Well, I’ve always been interested in filmmaking. I was that kid. My favorite movie back in the day was Boomerang, The Five Heartbeats and Malcolm X and I would run them back and forth consistently rewinding and watching shots. And then I would get to the end of the film at the end of the credits when the director would do a whole commentary on the film. And I was a theater kid at first, and that was my start into the business. I started at nine years old and once I got to a performance of high school. Shout out to Brooklyn School for Musical Theater. They trained us as actresses and they set to be a great actors. You had to know a great script. And when I got a chance to write my first script, I was like, This is an out-of-body experience. This is exactly what God put me on this earth to do. And that’s what I founded. I started directing plays and then eventually film.

John L. Hanson Jr. And what was that first script?

Chanel Dupree My God. It was called The Rhythm Within. I was very young when I went natural and I was in a predominantly Black school, and apparently that was a very big issue. And I wasn’t expecting that because I’m like, we all Black. We all got curly hair, don’t we? And there was a lot of like bullying and backlash that I had to maneuver through. And I wrote up a script and a play based off of that.

John L. Hanson Jr. Do you find other African-American women involved in this industry?

Chanel Dupree Yeah, absolutely. There’s so much untapped artists and gems out there that haven’t gotten their big break, but just incredible women in the playwriting industry and the screenwriting world and directing and cockily and all by like the community. I have the indie world and I’m just excited when one person or a group of I finally, like get into the hemisphere because I see talent every day.

John L. Hanson Jr. Prior to your latest offering a documentary, you think your ground is mounting adult fiction. In 2021, you did a, I guess, a dark comedy called Next Star. Talk to us about that.

Chanel Dupree Yes. So, you know, growing up, we are told where I live should be by certain times. And 2021 was in the midst of the biggest pandemic that we have seen in recent times. And I wrote this surrealistic dark comedy about this woman having to leave her apartment and go see her mom and all of what that means to be 30 years old and having to go back home. All of the guilt and the doubt and the disappointment that you may feel with yourself and also with like the circumstances around you. And what does it mean to have to go back to a not so happy place where you are supposed to be so established and so stable.

John L. Hanson Jr. And who made up the team for that particular project?

Chanel Dupree Um, an incredible cinematographer. Kenny, my producer that was also on ‘You Think You Grown?’. Lee Evans. She actually was an actress in the movie and had a wonderful gaffer who was also on the documentary, and I was one of the great actresses in the film. I played multiple versions of myself, basically multiple emotions that I was experiencing at the same time. I had a wonderful birthday being Sharon. I had some wonderful people that continued with me onto my next project in.

John L. Hanson Jr. In 2022, offering ‘Black Retail.’ I needed a three day weekend. I found that it very interesting that three African-American millennial women. Talk to us about that project.

Chanel Dupree Black Retail is one of my babies from 2018. That’s when I first started to develop it. Okay. I was working in retail at the time. And, you know, of course, being a Black woman service, there are experiences of racism, of people seeing you as their health and not just someone in a store helping you, an associate guiding your fashion process. It was more of people wanting a personal life to see the work of a person. As late as this, I kind of I think I can call and I was starting to write a series based on that. Black women in retail is a comedy, of course, but a Black woman in retail, what does that mean? To always be absurd is the same as I started to open up the show more and I saw that they were performing in their personal lives as well. That’s when it became a little bit more deepened for me because the same smiles that they had to give to their boss and these customers that are rude to them and the same smiles that they have to give to family and partners and loved ones. And when do Black women actually get a chance to clock out? And so that’s the center of Black retail.

John L. Hanson Jr. It seems that your other prior to projects you were taking your particular project from real life experiences. Did I miss something?

Chanel Dupree No, definitely. Definitely. It’s been a way to not just entirely tell my particular experience, but seeing this thread from my experience and how it is connected to so many people. You know, while I was creating myself in Black retail, so many of my friends strangers, I would go to parties and everyone’s having the same conversation. So I felt validated that people will also in the work because it wasn’t just me having all of these like identity question, Who am I? Where do I want to be and who how am I going to kind of try to find a balance in all of this?

John L. Hanson Jr. When you begin a project, obviously you write it down. So at what point you’ve. Stray away from what your original idea is due to the fact that once you start filming, other things take place.

Chanel Dupree So I have been researching ‘You Think You Grown?’ since 2016 and I made four projects since then. With a documentary specifically, it takes so much time to research. It is articles. It’s journals, it’s books, it’s podcasts. It’s so many things that you’re consuming because unlike a narrative film or pilot, you write it and then you shoot exactly what you wrote. The documentaries, you can have points of what you want to discuss if you have to. It’s a puzzle. You have to slowly bring it together, even after production. You feel like you see the movie together, how it should be. And so I knew that I wanted to build my portfolio. I also wanted to build my directorial voice and know what my directorial voice was, and I knew that I wanted to lead a few more teams before I got to lead you ground because I knew the impact that it needed. I knew the seriousness of you and I knew the focus that it needed and the like. Four months after Black Retail, while it was in the editing phase, I was like, okay, I’m ready to take all of this research and pieces together to make a complete film. And I took a weekend at my sister’s home in Virginia and literally like displayed everything, all highlighted research, books, papers, and they built that. And I think that doing it in that way allowed me to still create, to still work, to still show people the range of me. Like I can make a comedy pilot, I can make surrealism comedy, but also I can do drama. Like it was able to like, build that voice so people could trust me when it was time for me to go to be released.

John L. Hanson Jr. What led you to the point that you thought this story needed to be told?

Chanel Dupree So I’m going to take us back to 2014. This was like the the mustard seed that grew and literally every every single step. So in 2014, there was a petition demand. It was created by a Black woman and it was signed by mostly Black people for 20,000 signatures, a petition to demand Beyoncé to straighten the lady’s hair. And she’s two years old at the time. I’m 20 and I’m watching not only this petition go viral and the comments about her big nose and her massive hair and I’m hearing it in beauty shops, in barbershops, in beauty supply stores, in our community. And it made me really just think about because I don’t know how adults talk about me, but I was two years old. But now I’m hearing them talk about this two year old child and what she should be and what she isn’t and all of these things. And then we continue two more years later. I’m teaching. I’m going to therapy at the same time. So I’m learning how much childhood impacts our evolution. And then I’m in school and I’m in the teacher’s lounge and I’m no longer in the student seat. I’m hearing teachers talk about how and I’m in a multiracial school, I’ve always been in the Black school, but I’m the multi-racial school. And I hear teachers say, she’s grown. I know she’s having sex, by the way. She’s walking. I know she’s going to be on drugs. I know she’s going to be baby mama. But when the white girls have a tantrum, if the white girls and maybe wear skirts too short, it is softened language. It is. Let’s get her sweater. She just made a little mistake. It was so much calm while the Black girls got this vitriol. And so that’s what began researching. And just so happened that that year, Georgetown had a research paper come out that was called Girl Interrupted. And it was all about the impact of the adultification bias. And that was the first time that I had heard adultification said out loud. And that’s when the research began.

John L. Hanson Jr. Of the women that are portrayed in the documentary, how did you find them? And were they obviously they were receptive, but were they taken back that you were doing this particular project?

Chanel Dupree So I’m lucky to know a lot of the women in the film, but I’m lucky to have a beautiful casting director, Ron Artis Junior. I when I pieced all of the research together and I said, okay, this is the beginning, the middle and the end of the film. This is what we’re going to do. I knew I needed therapists. I knew I needed educators. I knew I needed young girls as well. Because if we’re headed into my childhood, I need to talk to children. And so and also I need Black women in the space of like, feeling like their work is about healing and they’re also comfortable with talking about their experiences. So I wrote an entire list of all the women I knew that fit in all those boxes because I did research, and this is 2016. I had been collecting a lot of emails and a lot of people’s names that they didn’t even know. But I was like, this started with because of this, especially because of that. And when I reached out to them, a lot of people were shocked. They were like, You just did a comedy pilot. What? But they were so much more overjoyed than they were shot. And we had free interviews with everyone, so they were comfortable with the questions before we got on set. This was eight months before we even got on set. So they were getting like five preliminary questions just to get them comfortable with talking about their experiences and applications as well. Also, I was able to use that audio to further build the film, and the questions I wanted to tell laid off.

John L. Hanson Jr. I understand. If you’re just joining us, I’m John L. Hanson Jr., and you’re listening to In Black America From KUT Radio. And we’re speaking with Chanel Dupree, founder of Artistic Laughter, writer, director of storytelling, independent filmmaker. And her recent documentary is entitled ‘You Think Your Grown? Dismantling Adultification.’  Ms. Dupree, how has adultification affected you as a young lady right now?

Chanel Dupree And you want me to go back to myself? I love it. I felt like in times it’s stunted growth. So I feel like I’m just now getting to a place where I’m processing my feelings. Because when you are a Black child, girl or not, your feelings are completely negated and let that go. You’re being grown. You’re talking back when you’re simply just expressing yourself. So my documentary goes from childhood to womanhood and how not being seen and not being heard leads you into adulthood. And I’m finding with myself now, I am fighting those voices that are that I heard from childhood telling me like, your feelings don’t matter. Being grown, I still try to silence those voices and listen to my own feelings. Something that should have been taught well in my childhood.

John L. Hanson Jr. The documentary moves along. Are there professionals that are articulating some of the side effects of of this particular occurrence?

Chanel Dupree Yeah. We have a beautiful therapist. She specializes in sexual wellness, also in sexual trauma therapy. And her name is Dr. Nikki Coleman. She’s on social media as Dr. Nikki Knows. And she speaks about in our second and third chapter how the sexualization of Black women, of Black girls affects them when they get older. For example, she used catcalling on the street, should be seen as a trauma and should be seen as a justification as well, because these girls are in the early stages of not knowing their bodies, but they’re knowing that it’s a target and then knowing that it’s an appetite for an older man. So when you get older, you don’t have a sense of your own body. You don’t have agency over yourself. It’s hard for you to speak up for yourself. You’re not comfortable in your body because it was objectified when your brain was still developing. And that was one of the biggest and brightest lessons that she gave in the film.

John L. Hanson Jr. How has social media and the media sea in which we live in today affecting these young women?

Chanel Dupree I had a remarkable, remarkable conversation with three lovely young ladies, Calise, Precious and Jada, in the film. And they spoke about how they will experience hardship with their teachers. And they will go on social media for safety, for peaceful release and see these harmful disparaging memes about them. Sometimes posted by people that say that they are their friends. So I think it’s so beautiful one of the young ladies say I think it was Jada or maybe Calise and also they said that Black women are only celebrated on social media when they are being funny or they may be made fun of. Now, these are 17 and 16 year old young ladies, and they are seeing that from their eyes. No, you know, adding for me, I just simply asks what the social media feel like for you. And they particularly said, you know, the Black Lives Matter movement. It was hard to see disparaging movies about the Black people that were killed, to see the ghetto Black women content, to see a lot of comedians take on that role and build an audience making fun of them and who they are. And it allows them to not have a release. There’s no space at home and being bombarded with your rhetoric and back in the day, ideals about who a Black girl is. And then I go in to school and my teacher is being so disparaging towards me more than anyone else. And then I go on social media and it’s the same thing. So it almost makes me feel trapped.

John L. Hanson Jr. How has slavery played into the stereotype and the perception of viewing of African-American girl bodies?

Chanel Dupree My, my, my. Slavery plays a huge, huge promise. Black children were never seen as children. Black girls were never sees that innocent from the moment they were born. They were cattle. They were workers. They were immediately there to help the business. And a beautiful, beautiful professor, oh God, in my documentary, she says that a lot of mothers had to prepare their daughters mentally and spiritually for rape. Let’s really sit with that. How do you prepare the mind, the body, the soul? The spirit? For it to be attacked by age ten, by age eight. These little girls were already in line to bear children who were not seen as innocent. They were not seen as as this was immoral to do to them. This is just a way of life. And so us as Black people, we have beautifully shredded a lot of the things from slavery, a lot of the mentality, a lot of the thinking. But there is a few things as oppressed people do when they are put in these situations that we held on to and we have to let go. Because ‘You Think You Grown?’ directly reflects back to slavery. We lose Black children, we’re just Black bodies and nothing else.

John L. Hanson Jr. Is there encouragement and hope prior to the end of the film?

Chanel Dupree That you talk to the young girls at last drop, of course, shut it all down. The dismantling. And we talk about reconnecting to your inner child and how that alone can heal you through to the next generation when you are raising children. We talk about how do you reinvent Black womanhood for yourself? How do you apologize and give grace to that young self of yours? How are you now with your daughters when you have all of this information, all of this insight, and you released it? And we in the film with a beautiful poem by Chanel Gabriel, an amazing poet and educator in NYC, and she leaves us with a breathtaking poem. And we see images of young girls playing and smiles and trees and hope. And she leaves us remembering who we are and that we are not with the path that’s taught us. We got such beautiful insight and and guidelines for how to heal what has been hurt.

John L. Hanson Jr. How do we go about re channeling this particular energy that people need to understand what’s going on is really harmful for these young ladies?

Chanel Dupree Beautiful question. I think that we need to drop our bias. I think that we need to know that we have a bias because you are severely oppressed. A lot of times we don’t think that we can be oppressors. But you can be you can be within your own community. And so I think going back and researching, if you don’t think adultification is connected to slavery and you think, I’m just speaking out my millennial butt I’m just saying anything because these are the truly facts. Okay, We’ll go back to re read the Slave journal, read journals. We need research on this and then have a conversation with yourself. Have I experienced it? Even Black men when where even Black girls have experienced it? Because Black men also experiences as well when they are younger and people call them my little boyfriend and my little has been and the emotional incest that a lot of people have with Black boys. So go back into yourself and say, well, do I have bias? Go back to yourself as a Black woman. Do I have bias? Am I letting my child experience this because I did? Because that’s not right. And then after you have that conversation with yourself, drop your bias before you open your mouth to have a conversation with a young girl and you maybe have an issue with her clothing, or maybe you think that she’s advocating for herself too much, who knows? Because it can be a wide range of things. Go into your psyche, go inside and say, How can I speak innocently to this child without breaking their spirit, without telling them something is wrong with them? And as this and make this a teachable moment, I think if we take all of those second steps and all of that education, I really do think we can build a better community with our children.

John L. Hanson Jr. During this process for the women from different educational and social backgrounds.

Chanel Dupree Yeah, I had a professor at the University of Kentucky. I’ve had some social workers, a beautiful poet doctor, and I have the Browns. We had younger therapists because I wanted to reach both factors. You know, I have Dr. Nikki, who specializes in sexual wellness and sexual trauma therapy. And then we have Jessica, who has a lot of Black women clients, and she’s a little bit fresher and newer inside of the therapeutic practice. And so they can give both perspectives from the therapeutic I. And then, of course, we had our young ladies. Some of them grew up in the Boogie Down Bronx, some from Brooklyn, some a completely white school. I wanted a full spectrum. I also had a principal. She was a principal for an all white school and for an all Black school. I really wanted to get all different type of perspectives in there because we all experience it, not just in certain education or socioeconomic backgrounds.

John L. Hanson Jr. I guess one of the elephant in the room, where did the perception comes from that African-American girls know more about sex than their white counterparts?

Chanel Dupree Slavery. It is literally like because Black girls bodies were violated so early on in history in their lives. People a lot of people don’t like to equate what Black enslaved girls and women experienced was rape. That’s number one. So that’s what we get Jezebel for. We get Jezebel to justify the rape. We get Jezebel to justify that because you’re just naturally hypersexual. You’re just naturally tantalizing. Know you because of your bias and because you believe that my body and my soul doesn’t matter. You want to take for me, but our world has to force it. It can’t see us as Black or we can’t be victims. Please. So it has to be shown as no, no more sexual, even more sexual experience. And Black girls? Absolutely not. We’ve been introduced to things far sooner than we should have, and their innocence was simply just preserved longer than ours.

John L. Hanson Jr. Before I ran out, time is to pray. Was this project therapeutic for you?

Chanel Dupree My God. I’m so happy I haven’t gotten that question absolutely throughout the process. First of all, it’s so, so healing to the child, me, adolescent, me, all versions of myself. I felt so healed and so seen in that moment while we were shooting. We have a great sound mixer for Pulse because it was a lot for me and sobbing because I felt it. And you know how we like to shout.

John L. Hanson Jr. Chanel Dupree, founder of Artistic Laughter Production and award winning screenwriter and director. If you have questions, comments or suggestions as to a future In Black America program, email us at inblackamerica.org. Also, let us know what radio station you heard us over. Don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast and follow us on Facebook and X. You can hear previous programs online at kut.org.  Also you can listen to a special collection of In Black America programs at American Archives of Public Broadcasting. That’s americanarchives.org. The views and opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of this station or of the University of Texas at Austin. Until we have the opportunity again for technical producer David Alvarez, I’m John L. Hanson Jr.  Thank you for joining us today. Please join us again next week.

Announcer CD copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing In Black America CD’s, KUT Radio, 300 West Dean Keaton St, Austin, Texas 78712. This has been a production of KUT Radio.

This transcript was transcribed by AI, and lightly edited by a human. Accuracy may vary. This text may be revised in the future.


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