White Supremacy, Obama’s 3rd Term and Black Commodification

How Get Out (2017) Unbinds and Pokes the Racial Wounds of Post-Racial America.

(May 2021)

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Slavery and the exploitation of Black bodies ended in 1865, as did all racism against black people. Since the abolishment of slavery, the end of Jim Crow laws and the complete respect and support for the Civil Rights Movement, America has progressed socially, politically, and economically in favour of equality for its African American people, so much so, that it eventually led to America's cultural resetting, first Black President in 2008…

This is the seductive post-racial utopia Director Jordan Peele seized at the time he began writing Get Out (2017). The creation of the film was under ‘woke’, politically correct and progressive pretences, during and post the Obama Era.

Get Out is a horrific, satirical exploration, on the surface, of social politics surrounding both the treatment and representation of black people, black culture and ‘black politics’ in America, through use of conventional horror genre tropes and traditions, such as body snatching, the ‘haunted house’ subgenre, the ‘uncanny valley’. However, the reading of the film through Trauma Theory, understood as the ‘attempt to articulate and critique the ways traumatic events become wounds on cultural, social, political and psychic life of those who experience them’ (Blake, 2008, p. 1), suggests the film’s exploration of potent white supremacy and it’s everlasting, and continuation, of significant racial abuse and distress unto Black Americans. The reflection of trauma theory unto Get Out relies more so on the unspoken, unwanted truths of the representations of the Armitage family, rather than the trauma ensued by the protagonist, Chris.

Peele’s direction of Chris’s character reflects the somewhat superficial and obvious aspects of horror; however, the unsettling psychological aspects of Chris’s girlfriend and her family are far more sinister when understood as hidden truths of reality. The underbelly of the text unbinds liberal White-America’s binding of racially violent wounds, the hidden deception of ‘wokeness’ and the ever-enduring exploitation of black bodies as means for White gain. Get Out explores the binding of historical racism in America, in an exaggerated manner to show the vindictiveness of ignorance. The binding of the West’s racist Hegemonic ideology in a post-Obama context equates to a supremacist understanding of who can speak about race and who determines if racism exists or not. The text reads trauma as intermittent, irrational, and paranoid pain at the expense of the black victim, and advantageous to the white perpetrators.

Get Out examines black pain and black exploitation, but at its fundamentals, the text studies white pleasure of black exploitation and the incessant need to occupy black bodies and black spaces. The plot focuses in on the villainous Armitage family’s kidnapping, lobotomising, and colonising of black bodies as vessels for white consciousnesses. The visceral nature of the Armitage family violence addresses the hidden and purposely forgotten trauma of anti-black America. Peele memorialises and repeats the trauma as a ‘work of mourning’ (Blake, 2008, p. 2), forcing the ‘woke’, white audience to address the repressed culpability of their identity history. This evokes perpetrator trauma and, much like the process of ‘Coagula’, the white supremacist conscious becomes immortal. Films surrounding the black experience usually explore themes of black pain, or perversely, solely rely on the exploitation of black pain. Blaxploitation films of the 1970’s, for example, used the black body as a commodity to establish racial archetypes for black identities, on and offscreen. Further, the exploitation of the black body created an ‘integrated and cohesive identity’ (Blake, 2008, p. 1), recognisable for non-black audiences, that seep into offscreen cultures.

The film’s release follows the uprise in the ‘Black Lives Matter’ political movement, a response to the unjust social and legal treatment of black people, first, in America, then globally, but specifically protests the severe police brutality affecting the black community. Peele challenges the self-identification of America as liberal and progressive in the era of the Black Lives Matter movement. The film is significantly released in the post-Trump era, whilst being created in the post-Obama era.

The anti-black violence appears gradually, beginning with awkward, micro aggressive points of liberal affirmations of ‘voting for Obama’s third term’, to unnatural use of outdated black slang towards Chris, (‘how long has this thang been going on’) and the references to Chris’s ‘genetic makeup’. The microaggressions appear not severe upon first viewing but are witnessed as ‘cringeworthy rather than malevolent’ (Jarvis, 2018, p. 99) exchanges for Chris and the spectating Black and ‘woke’ audiences. The focus on Chris’s ‘blackness’ foremost represents the Armitage (and their party guests’) initial viewings of Chris as a black man, and clumsily try to dismiss their white-identity responsibility of being adverse or ignorant to black culture. However, further knowledge of the plot suggests it’s the only thing they will notice, they enjoy being ignorant to Chris’s individual, focusing him as the ‘other’ purposefully. Othering Chris (and the prior enslaved black victims) creates tension and anxiety for both Victim and Witness to the trauma encoded within the text.

Chris, Walter, Georgina, and Logan represent the trauma ‘victim’. In the narrative, they are the literal victims of the Armitage’s lobotomised torture, but they also represent the specific black victim-identity most recognisable with the legacy of slavery. The audience, as witness to the historical trauma of black history, understand the context and inter-cultural legacy of slavery and anti-black ideology and therefore recognise the contradiction between the physical enslavement of black bodies against the ‘woke’, post-racial ideology the Armitage family spouts throughout the narrative. This suggests that the black identity is inherently traumatised, an identity synonymous with brutality, slavery, and racism.

The tension continues with the silent auction of Chris at the garden party. This scene represents the bridge between the historical past and political present, an example of the unspoken and secretive commodification of the black body, in present day. The post-Obama era made ‘it fashionable to be black’, according to a party guest in the text, this encourages the anti-black ideology of post-racial America and represses the trauma of slavery, for both White and Black Americans. The gesturing liberal façade prior to the auction is swiftly destroyed and the silence is now understood as the quiet, continuation of blackness as a product to sell or own, continuing the legacy of white forefathers’ infatuation with blackness. The historical identity of white equalling coloniser is, though exaggerated, literal with the abduction of black bodies in Get Out.

The final act of violence is presented through the reveal of the ‘Coagula’. The fascination, nay obsession, with colonising blackness lives on through ‘enlightened’ Whites and non-Blacks taking up room in black spaces, appropriating and now, living through the black body. Coagula, though a plot device, also becomes a narrative device, expressing to the non-Black audience that the white consciousness, even in a black body, will not understand or share the historical and generational trauma of enslaved victimhood at the hands of Hegemonic culture. The use of the ‘body snatching’ trope here nods to the omnipresent conventions and influences of body horror traditions in Peele’s creative process. Landsberg further explains the use here of formal mechanics of horror film is ‘not for cheap thrills’, but ‘to advance a point about the invisibility of racial exploitation amongst ‘liberal’ whites.’ (2018, p. 635).

The presentation of Get Out as a post-racial, suggests the deeper paradox of White America’s ‘seeing no colour’ policies. For one to claim not to see colour, they must first see it to purposefully ignore it or will it away. Post-racial tendencies in the textual analysis of Get Out are recognised by Jarvis and Landsberg. Jarvis defines post-racial as the contemporary fantasy ‘after’ of America’s ‘racist-era before’ (2018, p. 98), a black and white, unrecognisable photo to our progressive, and, ironically, ‘colourless’ racial laws of now. Whereas, Landsberg understands post-racial as a ‘mask’, a seductive discourse for white people who ‘wish to deny the existence of racism… and affirm their distance from it’ (2018, p. 634). The dismissal of race-related issues within the narrative create realism for Black audiences, the heightened ‘anti-racist’ position of the Armitage family creates an irrational paranoia for Chris, and thus the films audience. The dismissal is a purposeful, ideological stance that eases the black individual into allowing the binding of exploitative, racially violent wounds, to appease the post-racial ideology for America's new, equal, and shared national identity.

To summarise, Get Out, whilst engaging in elements of black pain, does not do so torturously, grossly or in excess as to not traumatise the already endangered Black audience. It, instead, uses the exploitation of black pain in film as the physical embodiment of the white exploitation of black pain in the creation of America’s cultural foundations.

Black suffering as represented in film, specifically horror, can be decoded as the trauma of the black-self offscreen. Get Out challenges the exploitative nature of White commodification of black bodies explicitly, by way of its literal use of auctioning and appropriating Chris, and through this challenge we see the ideological disruption caused by the re-representing of slavery and anti-black racial violence.

Peele offers the text as a denaturalising and defamiliarization of liberalist culture in America. In destabilising the audience, as witness, understanding of ideology it forces them to see America’s desire to bind the wounds of racial inequality. Instead of hiding the cultural trauma, it represents the binding as just as dangerous as the historical slave/master relationship between Black and White Americans.

Bibliography

Blake, L., 2008. The Wound of Nations. 1st Edition ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Jarvis, M., 2018. Anger Translator: Jordan Peele's Get Out. Science Fiction Film and Television, 11(1).

Landsberg, A., 2018. Horror verite: politics and history in Jordan Peele's Get Out (2017). Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 32(5).