Slavery

Image

One consistent theme throughout the film is it’s allusions to American slavery in both overt and obscure ways. Some scenes evoke the submissive relationship of a servant to their master, while others illuminate the insidious ways in which slavery has informed U.S. race relations, as well as the expansion, proliferation and dexterity of heteropatriarchy. While not comprehensive, below are a few key moments in which allusions to slave time were particularly striking:

Scene #1: The sizing up of the Chris’ physicality when the family first sits down to dinner:

Jeremy: Because with your frame and your genetic makeup … if you really pushed your

body … And I mean really train. No pussyfooting around. You’d be a fucking beast.

Missy: What have I missed?
Rose: A whole bunch of nothing. – We just talking about sports.

Scene #2: … And when he is introduced in the ‘party’ hosted by the Amitage’s

Neighbor #1: Oh, How handsome is he? … Not bad, huh Nelson? So, is

it true? Is it better?

Neighbor #2: Fair skin has been in favor for the past what, couple of hundreds of years…
But now the pendulum has swung back. Black is in fashion.

Scene #3: Most notably, the auction, which is when the audience first discovers that the party is really a silent auction for Chris’ body

Dean: How about sparklers and bingo?

Scene #4: When the mission of the The Order of the Coagula is explained

Roman: You have been chosen because of the physical advantages you enjoyed your entire lifetime. With your natural gifts and our determination we could both be part of something greater. Something perfect.

Scene #5: When the mission of the The Order of the Coagula is explained (continued)

Rod: They’re probably abducting black people, brainwashing them and making them Slaves… or sex slaves, not just regular slaves, but sex slaves and shit. See I don’t know if it’s the hypnosis that’s making them slaves or whatnot…but all I know is they already got two brothers we know and they could be a whole bunch of brothers they got already.

Scene #6: When the mission of the The Order of the Coagula is explained (continued)

Jim Hudson: A sliver of you will still be in there somewhere. Limited consciousness. You’ll be able to see and hear … What your body is doing, but your existence will be as a passenger. An audience. You will live in …

Chris: The Sunken Place.

___

Throughout the course of this movie, and especially in the above scenes, we learn that the relationship between Rose and Chris is not the romance it first appeared. Chris is not Rose’s first ‘Black boyfriend’ as she claimed. Scrolling through the list of latest NBA drafts, we learn that Rose exclusively targets black men. Wrapped up in the her rationale for that target pool are assumptions about black men’s physicality – their youth, athleticism, able-bodiedness, muscularity, health, virility, etc. She has a type in the truest sense of the word. The Armitage experiment is predicated on their full subscription to the stereotypes of Black men. More subtle however lies assumptions about their mental fortitude, or lack thereof. Rose is situated within the Armitage family tradition, the conception of the Order of the Coagula by patriarch Roman Armitage. This secret evil cult promises white people a new [black] body to host their conscious and prolong their existence on Earth. In order for mission to be constructed as a morally sound and justifiable endeavor, Blackness has to be cast in the certain light, and both the black body and mind has to be divested of many of the attributes that equate it with all the humanity, value, and competence of those of a white person’s. The following analysis will draw from the United States’ history of slavery while utilizing feminist theory to unmask some of these assumptions.

Dean Armitage presides over the auction and he’s nothing like the easy going, forgivably ignorant character that we are first presented with in the beginning of the movie. Dean proposes a casual game of Bingo and initially, this appears to be fitting with his character (it’s worth mentioning that Bingo is an American pastime commonly associated with elderly white people). Throughout this entirely silent scene however, we see Dean for who he really is – a cold, decisive, mastermind, a perpetrator of an insidious with even more sinister underpinnings. As the camera zooms out from Dean’s face to his hands to his body, and finally captures the entire pavilion, a golden-framed picture of Chris is revealed to the audience, and here the plot unfolds.

The hand gestures, the winning Bingo cards, the clapping when Jim Hudson appears to make the highest bid and win, all make this scene ostentatiously reminiscent of a slave auction. In similar fashion, slaves were property, merchandise, and were handled as such. They could be “sold, traded or inherited … abused, branded, bred, exploited or killed” (History.com, 2009). In the tradition of chattel slavery, slaves  maintain their slave status for a lifetime, and any children born to them are also relegated to slave status. Why did Black bodies make good slaves? “In the early 17th century, European settlers in North America turned to African slaves as a cheaper, more plentiful labor source than indentured servants (who were mostly poorer Europeans)”(“Chattel Slavery.”, 2015). Slavery because a hugely economical practice and thus, slave owners devised a method to control and assert the power they created for themselves over slaves. Black bodies, and particularly black male bodies, were essentially machines for production.

Feminist theorists Judith Butler, Ferreira da Silva, Roderick Ferguson, Sojourner Truth, and many many more, place heavy emphasis on conceptualizations of the body in feminist theory. Therefore, to understand the nuances of micro- and macro-level aggressions Chris experiences throughout the entirety of Get Out, we first turn way back in time to American slavery to contextualize the Black body in its initial stages of existence in the United States.

Black bodies subverted conventional European understandings of beauty, decorum, cognition and sanctity. Therefore, there was no conception of black bodies as unequivocally human.  “There is nothing sacred about Black … bodies … they are not off-limits, untouchable, or unseeable” (Guy-Sheftall, 2002). There were, and still are today, constant placed in close proximity to ape-like savages, and drawn as the inferior antithesis of the refined, civil, European man. And so the process begins. Europeans start out by construing conditions of black bodies as unnatural, exotic, inhuman, and then through chattel slavery, recreating the very conditions that cripple black bodies mentally, physically, and emotionally. As explained by Frederick Douglass, African American slave turned freedman,  “My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!”

As less than human, black bodies become the subject of all manner of tests to extract their monetary value and utility. Described below is the sentiment of a [White] man present at a slave auction.

“He was a muscular fellow, broad-shouldered, narrow-flanked, but rather small in stature ;. he had on a broad, greasy, old wideawake, a blue jacket, a coarse cotton shirt, loose and rather ragged trousers and broken shoes. The expression of his face was heavy and sad, but it was by no means disagreeable, in spite of his thick lips, broad nostrils and high cheek bones. On his bead ·was wool instead of hair; his whiskers were little flacculent, black tufts, and his skin was as dark as that of the late Mr. Dyce Sombre or of Sir Jung Bahadoor himself. I am neither sentimentalist, nor Black Republican, nor negro· worshipper, but I confess the sight caused a strange thrill through my heart tried in vain to make myself familiar with the fact that I could, for the sum of nine hundred and seventy-five dollars become as absolutely the owner of that mass of blood, bones, sinews, flesh and brains, as of the horse which stood by my side” (“a Slave Auction Described by Russell.”, 1861).

Another testament goes further to describe the measures of evaluation for black bodies in preparation for slave auctions.

“…The negroes were examined with as little consideration as if they had been brutes indeed; the buyers pulling their mouths open to see their teeth, pinching their limbs to find how muscular they were, walking them up and down to detect any signs of lameness, making them stoop and bend in different ways that they might be certain there was no concealed rupture or wound; and in addition to all this treatment, asking them scores of questions relative to their qualifications and accomplishments..”(Doesticks, 1859).

“Colonial rule simultaneously involved racializing and sexualizing the population, which also meant naturalizing whiteness” (Alexander, 1994). Creating such distance between Black bodies, humanity and citizenship served to “ease white male guilt about the enslavement and oppression of Africans…” during times of slavery, and we see exactly the same notions operating in full effect in Get Out (Guy-Sheftall, 2002). Black bodies, the economic pivot of slave-plantation economy, were sexualized (Alexander, 1994) – Particular focus on black genitalia “reinforced the European connection between lasciviousness, sexuality, and animal passion among Africans in general…”(Guy-Sheftall, 2002). As in times of slavery, we see the neighbors take liberties with Chris’ body that I’d argue White people surely wouldn’t dare to take with other white people (Scenes 2 and 3 above). The script certainly alludes to it, but on scene he is poked, prodded and felt up. Having just been introduced to Chris, one woman even dares to ask Rose about their sex life and Chris’ genitalia. In these scenes, Peele is drawing from a long history with regards to black bodies.

 

slave auction, virginia, 1861, black history, slave trade

Fetishization of the Black Body

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.

Commentary on the Use of Police

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.

 

 

Postracial America

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.