Monthly Archives: May 2017

What to Watch Next

Posted on by
Reply

Blackish: An American sitcom following an upper-middle-class African-American family.

 

Dear White People: A Netflix-original series featuring African-American students exploring today’s “post-racial” society at Winchester University, a predominantly white Ivy League college.

 

Straight Outta Compton: A biographical drama narrating the career of N.W.A., a gangsta rap group founded in Compton, California in 1986.

 

Insecure: An HBO-original series depicting exploring black womanhood through the lens of two, African-American women in their late twenties.

 

Detroit: A historical drama centered around The Algiers Motel Incident in 1967, which left three dead and nine brutally beaten, spurring one of the largest citizen uprisings in United States history.

 

Fruitvale Station: A biographical drama portraying the events leading up to the murder of Oscar Grant, an unarmed African-American man, in Oakland, California in 2009.

 

Selma: A historical drama following the events leading up to and following the 1965 Selma Voting Rights March during the Civil Rights Movement.

 

Atlanta: Atlanta is a camera, semi-autobiographical comedy-drama series created by and starring Donald Glover. The series is about two cousins navigating their way in the Atlanta rap scene in an effort to improve their lives and the lives of their families.

 

Works Cited

Posted on by

“a Slave Auction Described by Russell.” The New England Farmer; a Monthly Journal (1848-1871), vol. 13, no. 7, 1861, pp. 342.

Alexander, M. J. “Not just (any) Body can be a Citizen: The Politics of Law, Sexuality and Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas.” Feminist Review, no. 48, 1994, pp. 11.

Agostinho, Daniela. “Ghosting and Ghostbusting Feminism.” Graduate Journal for the Study of Culture 6 (2016): 1-16. Print.

Benjamin, Rich. “Get Out and the Death of White Racial Innocence.” The New Yorker. 21 Mar. 2017. 27 May 2017. <http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/get-out-and-the-death-of-white-racial-innocence>.

Bernstein, Elizabeth. “Militarized humanitarianism meets carceral feminism: The politics of sex, rights, and freedom in contemporary antitrafficking campaigns.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 36, no. 1 (2010): 45-71.

“Chattel Slavery.” Fight Slavery Now! N.p., 14 Dec. 2015. Web. 31 May 2017.

Chew, Huibin Amelia. “What’s Left? After ‘Imperialist Feminist’ Hijackings.” Feminism and War: Confronting US Imperialism. Ed. Robin L. Riley, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Minnie Bruce Pratt. New York: Zed, 2008. 75-90.

Complex, Valerie. “Will It Get Better For Black People In the Horror Genre?” Black Girl Nerds. 31 July 2015. Web. 11 Apr. 2015.

Cruz, Lenika. “In Get Out, the Eyes Have It.” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 03 Mar. 2017. Web. 28 May 2017. <https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/03/in-get-out-the-eyes-have-it/518370/>.

Desta, Yohana. “Jordan Peele’s Get Out Almost had an Impossibly Bleak Ending.” Vanity Fair, 03 Marc. 2017. Web. 39 May 2017. <http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/03/jordan-peele-get-out-ending>.

Doesticks, Q. K. P. What Became of the Slaves on a Georgia Plantation? Great Auction Sale of Slaves, at Savannah, Georgia, March 2d & 3d, 1859. A Sequel to Mrs. Kemble’s Journal. , 1863.

Ellison, Treva. “The Strangeness of Progress” from Johnson, E. Patrick, ed. No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies. Duke University Press, 2016. and “The Disorder of Law and Order” http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2930-the-disorder-of-law-and-order-free-bresha-meadows (Links to an external site.)

Gutiérrez, Gabriel. “Black Culture Is Cool, So Why Aren’t Black People?” Medium. N.p., 10 June 2015. Web. 28 May 2017. <https://medium.com/hey-guys-lets-talk-about-cool-stuff-swag/black-culture-is-cool-so-why-aren-t-black-people-1929d6e7bcc2>.

Guy-Sheftall, Beverly.  2002. “The Body Politic:  Black Female Sexuality and the 19th C. Euro-American Imagination,” in Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture, edited by Kimberly Gisele Wallace-Sanders. Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press, pp:  14.

Hancock, Ange-Marie. ““We Are Named by Others and We Are Named by Ourselves”.” Intersectionality (2016): 161-91. Print.

Harris, Tamara Winfrey. “All Hail the Queen?” Bitch Media. N.p., 20 May 2013. Web. 28 May 2017. <https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/all-hail-the-queen-beyonce-feminism>.

History.com Staff. “Slavery in America.” History.com. A&E Television Networks, 2009. Web. 31 May 2017.

Hutson, Matthew. “Whites See Blacks as Superhuman.” Slate Magazine, 14 Nov. 2014. Web. 28 May 2017. <http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/11/whites_see_black s_as_superhuman_strength_speed_pain_tolerance_and_the_magical.html>.

Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. “Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism.” Feminist Studies, vol. 39, no. 3, 2013, pp. 669–685. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23719431.

Lennon, Kathleen, “Feminist Perspectives on the Body”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/feminist-body/>.

Lewis, Ethan. “The ABCs of Horror Tropes.” Den of Geek. 26 Apr. 2013. Web. 11 Apr. 2016.

Means Coleman, Robin R. Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present. New York: Routledge, 2011. Web. 11 Apr. 2016.

Meyer, Robinson. “The Courage of Bystanders Who Press ‘Record.'” The Atlantic. 08 Apr. 2015. 27 May 2017. <https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/04/the-courage-of-bystanders-who-press-record/389979/>.

Moses, Joy. “‘Get Out’: What Black America Knows About The Sunken Place.” The Huffington Post, 12 Mar. 2017. Web. 28 May 2017. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/get-out-what-black-america-knows-about-the-sunken_us_58c199f8e4b0c3276fb7824a>.

Preciado, Paul Beatriz “Feminism Beyond Humanity, Ecology beyond the Environment” – http://autonomies.org/it/2015/07/paul-beatriz-preciado-feminism-beyond-humanism-ecology-beyond-the-environment/

Roberts, Dorothy E. “The Politics of Race and Science: Conservative Colorblindness and the Limits of Liberal Critique.” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 12, no. 01 (2015): 199-211

Sandbeck, Sune. “Towards an Understanding of Carceral Feminism as Neoliberal Biopower.” In Annual Conference of the Canadian Political Science Association, University of Alberta. Retrieved from http://www. cpsa-acsp. ca/papers2012/Sandbeck. pdf. 2012.

da Silva, Denise Ferreira. “No-Bodies.” Griffith Law Review 18.2 (2009): 212-36. Print.

Smith, Ariel. “Indigenous Cinema and the Horrific Reality of Colonial Violence.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society. 13 Feb. 2015. Web. 11 Apr. 2016.

Rose: The Relationship

Posted on by
Reply

Chris and Rose

Chris: Do they know… Do they know I’m black?
Rose: No.
Chris: Should they? It seems like… something you might want to know… mention.
Rose: Mom and Dad, my uh, my black boyfriend will be coming up this weekend… and I just don’t want you to be shocked because he’s a black man.
Chris: You said I was the first black guy you ever dated?
Rose: Yeah, so what?
Chris: Yeah, so this is uncharted territory for them. You know I don’t want to be chased off the lawn with a shotgun.
Rose: You’re not going to. First of all, my dad would have voted for Obama a third time if he could have. Like, the love is so real… They are not racist. I would have told you. I wouldn’t be bringing you home to them.

Rose is innocent. No matter what. Or, at least, that’s how she sees it. Again and again, in every scene she is in, Rose casts herself in the light of the innocent, good, pure-hearted white woman. She is the white woman who is progressive, because she is dating her first-ever (!) black man, she is the white woman who is brave, because she stands up for him in front of a cop, and she is the white woman who is good and pure because she is white and female, even when she finally unmasks herself with “You know I can’t give you those keys, right, babe?”

Rose’s conversations with her boyfriend-slash-victim Chris are carefully chosen words that show how innocent a person Rose sees herself as. Her actions do not speak louder than her words because her actions are almost entirely passive. In every case, Rose does not really act aggressively, but it is that absence of thought that show the white woman privilege Rose capitalizes on. We can see this through analyzing several of her conversations with Chris.

In the introductory scene above, Rose casts herself as the woman who comes from a progressive background, who loves her black boyfriend, and who has not fallen prey to the beauty standards of white-driven media, because she has a black boyfriend. In mocking Chris’s concerns over her white family’s racism, Rose plays the aware girlfriend who understands race relations that she is not on the receiving end of. As a white woman, she is not threatened by racism, and as a white woman, she cannot see how she—innocent and nonthreatening—can be a member of a community who would oppress people of color. “They are not racist. I would have told you. I wouldn’t be bringing you home to them.” Rose believes she understands the black experience, and she casts herself in the dominant role in the relationship as the protector of the black man.

Rose confronting the policeman

Police: Sir, can I see your license, please?

Rose: Wait, why?

Chris: Yeah, I have a state ID.

Rose: No, no, no. He wasn’t driving.

Police: I didn’t ask who was driving. I asked to see his ID.

Rose: Yeah, why? That doesn’t make any sense.

Chris: Here.

Rose: No, no, no. Fuck that. You don’t have to give him your ID because you haven’t done anything wrong.

Chris: Baby, baby, it’s okay. Come on.

Police: Anytime there is an incident we have every right to ask…

Rose: That’s bullshit.

Rose’s role as the innocent, progressive protector of the black man continues in the above dialogue. After Rose hits a deer in her car, a policeman comes and Rose finds an opportunity to push forward her innocent yet aware warrior agenda. She appears to stand up for Chris, using her awareness of her white privilege—and her awareness of her automatically innocent status as a white woman—to protect Chris from the policeman. However, by inserting herself into the situation, she could have escalated it. Her role is not to protect him, it is to progress the image she has of herself. If she can convince herself she understands the relationship between Chris and the white policeman, she can absolve herself of racism, which is what she is most terrified of. Her second agenda in not allowing the police officer to see Chris’s ID is not immediately apparent. If the officer sees his ID, he will have a paper trail of proof that Rose and Chris were together immediately before Chris goes missing, which undermines her alternative agenda.

Rose and Chris

Chris: I mean, how are they different from that cop?

…

Rose: I don’t like being wrong.

Chris: I’ve noticed that.

Rose: I am sorry.

Chris: No, no, no. Wait, come here.

Rose: Sorry. This sucks.

Chris: What? Why do you say you’re sorry?

Rose: Because I brought you here and I’m related to all of them.

Blaming yourself is a classic, well-known, and generally considered rather irritating and insincere way of absolving yourself of the blame. Rose realizes that her family is not as “not racist” as she would like to think they are—and by extension, herself. By blaming herself, Rose is forcing Chris to say that she is not guilty, that she is different, that she is the young, attractive, desirable white woman who does not hold the blame for racism because she, too, is a victim of the patriarchy. Rose is desperate in this scene to be absolved of any guilt, and in doing so, she again forces Chris to cast her as the progressive, innocent white woman.

Chris: Rose, give me those keys. Give me those keys! Rose, now, now! The keys!

Jeremy: Whoa, be careful, bro.

 

Chris: Where are those keys, Rose?

Rose: You know I can’t give you the keys, right, babe?

As Chris is desperately trying to get out of the Armitage’s house with the family blocking him and supposedly with only Rose on his side, Rose suddenly turns on him. The way she does it, however, is so unlike everybody else. Missy’s hypnotism is innately sinister and terrifyingly controlling. She is the slave driver—literally—who controls her slaves through the essence of elitism and colonialism: a china tea cup. Dean’s re-enactment of a slave auction while his daughter and Chris take a walk in the woods has long since betrayed his own blatantly racist motives. Jeremy’s brandishing of the lacrosse stick (a game often associated with upper-class white privilege, particularly on the East Coast) casts him as the violent racist. And while Chris gets more and more agitated and starts getting angry with Rose because of his frustration and fear, Rose begins to act pitiful. She is not the warrior protectress, but the innocent white woman being yelled at by her black boyfriend who cannot possibly be on the bad side. And it is in this mix of the Armitage’s violence against Chris and Chris’s anger and frustration that Rose simultaneously blames Chris for her “switch” and excuses herself from it. Her statement is incredibly patronizing, emphasizing the white privilege that she pretends to not want. It is the same sentence that might be said to a drunk boyfriend who promises that he can drive home; it is the sentence that says “I know what is best for you,” and laughs at the drunk boyfriend for thinking he has any say in the matter. She calls him “babe” to recall her relationship to him and to emphasize her power over him and manipulation of him. While everybody else is brandishing a lacrosse stick or a cup of tea and running around, Rose’s calm presence stands out as the most dangerous of all.

Rose drinking milk and eating Froot Loops

In a scene with no dialogue, Rose sips on a white cup of milk while eating a separate cup of colored cereal. The symbolism here is obvious, but what is equally as jarring is the transition from the previous scene to now. In the previous scene, Chris fights Missy off brutally. He has the obvious physical advantage but with her teacup, he has no chance against her. Yet, he wins, and he is panting, dark, and sweating after his violent fight. Contrast that with the slicked-back, white-clothed Rose, calmly sitting in her childhood bedroom. While he is fighting for his life, she has already forgotten about him as she sits searching for her next boyfriend. While their relationship is tightly woven for him, with her effects long-lasting and devastating to him, she is calm and problem-free. She has cut her ties, but he is unable to cut his. By removing herself from the situation and through using her earbuds, Rose retains her innocence of the terrible acts and desperate fight going on downstairs. She is the blissfully innocent white woman, even when proven guilty. Additionally, as she searches for potential boyfriends, she sits confidently in her knowledge that as the white woman, she is attractive. She is the white female lure that black men cannot resist, and who will be able to snatch them from their lives, families, and friends with little difficulty, because she is beautiful, innocent, and most importantly: white.

Chris leaning over Rose as the police car pulls up

In the final scene, as the police car rolls up, Rose gleefully takes advantage of her white womanhood to place herself as the innocent victim of the whole scene. With the police lights flashing, Rose knows that the police have seen Chris kneeling over her, threatening her with apparently no violence on her part, and she reaches out to them: “Help…” Chris knows that she has won, too. He stands up, he puts his hands up, and he is desperately resigned to his unfair, racialized and gendered fate at the hands of the beautifully innocent white woman. Although in the end, Chris is rescued by his best friend, this moment could have so easily remained the well-known trope of the innocent white woman brutalized by the wild black man, successfully cast, directed, and acted by Rose’s white womanhood.

Connection to Readings

“We must face the dominant US ideology: that our culture represents the epitome of women’s liberation. Gendered oppression is largely considered irrelevant to women in the USA — a blight instead reserved for people in other countries.” – Huibin Chew, Feminism and War: Confronting US Imperialism

Rose is constantly insinuating that she represents the epitome of a not-racist woman. She believes that she always has the better understanding of interracial relationships than Chris does and that she is able to make the better choices for him because she lives in what she believes to be a post-racial society. Additionally, although she is masterfully using the image of the innocent white woman, Rose seems unaware that her self-representation is a reflection of the patriarchy’s view of white women as a group of lesser people that must be protected, particularly from black men.

Postracial America

Posted on by
Reply

Image result for get out dean armitage and chris

Chris: Do they know… Do they know I’m black?
Rose: No.
Chris: Should they? It seems like… something you might want to, you know… mention.
Rose: “Mom and Dad, my uh, my black boyfriend will be coming up this weekend, and I just don’t want you to be shocked because he’s a black man… Black.
Chris: You said I was the first black guy you ever dated?
Rose: Yeah, so what?
Chris: Yeah, so this is uncharted territory for them. You know I don’t want to be chased off the lawn with a shotgun.
Rose: You’re not going to. First of all, my dad would have voted for Obama a third time if he could have. Like, the love is so real. I’m only telling you that because he is definitely going to want to talk to you about that… and it will definitely fucking suck. But that’s because he’s a lame dad more than anything else. They are not racist. I would have told you.

Get Out disrupts sanitized notions of race in the U.S. Throughout the movie, we are confronted with the abject danger of colorblindness. In this initial scene between Chris and Rose, her father’s acceptance of Chris is predicated on his “love” for former President Barack Obama. Ultimately the election of Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president, ushered in a new era of “post-racialism” in the U.S. This ideology purports that America is free from prejudice, discrimination, and racial preference. But Get Out depicts how our goal should be inverted, from post-racial to post-racist.

Image result for get out dean armitage

Dean Armitage is cast as “the nice racist”– the white liberal that gives critical purchase to post-racialism. As he shows Chris around the Armitage “plantation,” he verifies Rose’s prediction. As the film progresses, the irony beneath Dean’s “post-racialism” is crystallized. The innocuous white liberal is revealed to be one of the most dangerous characters in the film. The Obama-lover led the “slave auction” and performed brain transplants on innocent black folks.

Dean: I know what you’re thinking.
Chris: What?
Dean: Come on, I get it. White family, black servants. It’s a total cliche.
Chris: I wasn’t going to take it there.
Dean: Well, you didn’t have to, believe me. Now, we hired Georgina and Walter to help care for my parents. When they died I just couldn’t bear to let them go. But boy, I hate how it looks.
Chris: Yeah, I know what you mean.

Dean: By the way, I would have voted for Obama for a third term if I could. Best president in my lifetime. Hands down.

In “The Politics of Race and Science: Conservative Colorblindness and the Limits of Liberal Critique,” Dorothy Roberts states: “Colorblind ideology posits that because racism no longer impedes minority progress, there is no need for social policies to account for race; any disadvantages people of color experience today result from their own flaws rather than systemic discrimination.” Peele’s development of Dean Armitage from the colorblind “lame dad” to the threatening white supremacist neurosurgeon shows the true danger of post-racialism.

Commentary on the Use of Police

Posted on by
Reply

Racial profiling is another significant commentary Jordan Peele inserts into Get Out. There are two key moments in the film that speak volumes to the stark realities of police violence.

Police: Sir, can I see your license, please?
Rose: Wait, why?
Chris: Yeah… I have a state ID.
Rose: No, no, no. He wasn’t driving.
Police: I didn’t ask who was driving. I asked to see his ID.
Rose: That doesn’t make any sense.
Chris: Here.
Rose: No, no, no. Fuck that. You don’t have to give him your ID because you haven’t done anything wrong.
Chris: Baby, baby, it’s okay. Come on.
Police: Anytime there’s an incident we have every right to ask…
Rose: That’s bullshit.

In this scene, Roses’ white femininity protects Chris from racial profiling. Although we later realize that Rose was not genuinely concerned about Chris’ safety, as she was primarily worried about creating a paper trail, she fulfills the dominant trope of the victimization of white women. White women must be saved and protected; they are the rational subjects of justice. They are protected by the law. Rose later deploys this strategy towards the ending of the film. As she lies on the ground, struggling against Chris, she sees the police siren and cries out “Help! Help!” In this moment, she plays into the historically and socially constructed binary of the helpless white woman/dangerous and aggressive black man.

Image result for get out movie police

In movie theaters across the country, we collectively gasped when we saw the police car lights approach Chris, as he raises his hands in surrender. In fact, Jordan Peele shot an alternate ending to the film that plays into the viewers’ fears that although Chris was able to escape the Armitage’s house, the violence that he encounters as a racialized body is inevitable. In a recent interview, Jordan Peele described this alternate ending: “He gets locked up and taken away for slaughtering an entire family of white people, and you know he’s never getting out, if he doesn’t get shot there on the spot.” Peele decided against this ending because it was “too real.” Instead, he comments: “The ending needed to transform into something that gives us a hero, that gives us an escape, that gives us a positive feeling.”

In “No-bodies: Law, Raciality, and Violence,” Danise da Silva focuses on the Brazilian state’s occupation and surveillance of favelas, economically dispossessed areas with majority black and brown populations, as a tool in which the state “acts only in the name of its own preservation.” Peele’s alternate ending only underscores the need to preserve the real and widespread fear that characterizes the relationships between people of color and the police. Moreover, Peele’s insertion of these two police scenes into Get Out further comments on the vulnerability of unarmed black and brown bodies to police violence.

 

 

Fetishization of the Black Body

Posted on by
Reply

Chris: “Why black people?”

Jim Hudson: “Who knows? Some people want to change– some people want to be stronger, faster, cooler. But don’t, please, don’t lump me into that. I couldn’t give a shit what color you are: what I want is deeper. I want your eyes, man. I want those things you see through.”

Stronger: Since even before America’s founding, African slaves have been the slave of choice due to their ability to complete back-breaking labor without succumbing to sickness or death. They are perceived as physically superior since they were forced to endure the hardest labor known to man and unending torture.

Faster: In a study conducted by Waytz, Hoffman, and Trawalter for Social Psychological and Personality Science, it was found that black people were chosen as more likely to possess superhuman abilities 65 percent of the time, but for everyday abilities, they were chosen only 46 percent of the time over white people. The study concludes that this theory of superhumanization stems from the perception that black people are physically superior while white people are mentally and emotionally superior. Waytz concludes, “Ultimately we believe that superhumanization is just another way of ‘othering’ African Americans.” Superhumanization, in the end, is just dehumanization in a cape.

Cooler: This obsession with black culture can be traced back to the introduction of black slaves into Southern homes. Before the cotton gin, slaves and masters worked in close quarters wherein slave owners took great interest in their slaves– watching the slaves play and even adopting facets of their language. Today, we see this appropriation of culture in a more blatant light. Kylie Jenner, a white reality TV star, dons dreads and Fashion Police praises her “edginess” but when Zendaya Coleman, a black actress, sports dreads, they must “smell like weed.” When Iggy Azalea highlights her big butt or Kylie Jenner’s big lip pout goes viral, Viola Davis is pegged as “less classically beautiful”. It has become cool to take on their culture without taking on the vessel with which they experience the world.

Your Eye: Jim Hudson explains that his desire to inhabit Chris’ body is more genuine than the others’– he is going to steal Chris’ agency in order to gain Chris’ perspective. This draws many parallels to the effects of being “colorblind” in the “post-racial” present. Jim Hudson excludes himself from racist people by noting the lack of importance he sets on “color” much like those that claim “colorblindness” champion their ignorance of the inherent variations in experience based on race. Jim Hudson condemns Chris to a place of paralysis by stealing Chris’ perspective as his own. This mirrors the way that dismissing the differences of minorities under inherently racist social and political structures doesn’t miraculously lift minorities to equality but rather buries and devalues their voices when they protest injustice. Like Jim Hudson robs Chris of his literal ability to control his body, those that claim they’re “colorblind” rob Black America of the credibility assigned to their stories of oppression and injustice.

Connections to the Readings

Da Silva sets the foundation for each of the following arguments by identifying Western imperialist ideals of a hierarchy of rationality based on the degree of variation from the phenotypical universal as the basis of most social and political structures today. Hancock builds on this by noting the distinct profit made from exploiting black stereotypes in the entertainment industry and its negative effects on the stereotyped group– just as the Armitage’s seek to make a profit by selling black bodies for their stereotypically beneficial attributes. Harris and Agostinho emphasize the way feminism and intersectionality are watered down to be more palatable to the general audience when utilized as a profit producing tool in mainstream media– speaking to the cool factor that the media exploits without addressing the systemic oppression of marginalized individuals. Lastly, Jackson identifies “colorblindness” as a term created by the privileged to erase uniqueness and refrain from addressing slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. In short, this scene of Get Out portrays the way society seeks to adopt and profit from black culture without addressing or attempting to ameliorate the oppressive natures that keep those that form the root of the culture from succeeding.

Connections to Current Events

Rachel Dolezal, the former president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, pretended to be of African American descent for several years. She has tried to integrate herself into black culture and has made multiple allegations of discrimination and hate crimes against her because of her white descent. While a student at Howard University, a historically black university, she began darkening her skin and changing her hair texture to appear “blacker.”

The Armitage family in the film also have an obsession with blackness and with being black. Both acknowledge racism but have switched it so that it is black people getting advantages that should, in some way, be theirs. In Dolezal’s case, she changes her appearance to fit in with a community that she wants to fit into. She does not appreciate the cultural appropriation that she is participating in, instead of viewing it as a “social construct” that she is able to manipulate as she likes. In the Armitages’ case, they undergo surgery in order to appropriate a body that they see as physically stronger, better, but also theirs to take. Neither sees black bodies or black culture as something that is not theirs to take at will, and neither appreciates the racism that black people face on a daily basis. In Get Out, several white people asked Chris if he liked the “African American experience.” It was not an opening to discuss the challenges he faces as a black person in a white-dominated society, but rather an expectation of their feelings—those that suggest that black people are facing fewer challenges than white people—being confirmed. They expected Chris to tell them that it was better being black. Both they and Rachel Dolezal fetishize the black body and the black culture.