Introduction
Few topics confronting society today generate as much discussion and debate as racism. Often, the definition of racism is a crucial component of the argument. To know how to operate morally in a society, a precise understanding of racism is necessary. Jordan Peele’s 2017 psychological thriller Get Out analyzes racism in the United States within the context of post-racial populism. By creating awareness through filmography, racism and racial discrimination can be eradicated from the United States through racial deconstructions (Laine, 2019). As a result of this racist precedent, producers realize that subliminal visual signals are an effective technique for expressing a political message to a large audience. While some may object to the production of racially instigated films, Get Out deciphers the existence of systemic racism. Get Out deconstructs systematic racism by white individuals by depicting violent black resistance as a need because of fear, white microaggressions, and code-switching.
Synopsis of the Film
Get Out is an intriguing view of the lives of Chris, a black guy, and his relationship with Rose, a white lady. Chris and Rose are on their way to Rose’s parent’s home in the country at the film’s opening. A short pause occurs when a deer rushes in front of its automobile and collides with it. The police arrived at the scene to ensure that everything was in order. However, they also requested Chris’s license and felt he was suspect because of his racial tone. Chris and Rose eventually arrive at Rose’s parents’ home. Their enormous home comes with a substantial quantity of land.
The whole family, including Chris, gathers for a celebratory meal. This is when Chris starts to feel uneasy for the first time. Chris notices that all of Rose’s family’s domestic staff is of color. Rose’s father attempts to explain to Chris that it is not “like that” since they were just with the family aiding the grandparents before their deaths. The next day, Rose’s family arranges a gathering of relatives and friends. This is one of the most significant sequences in the film, which we shall elaborate on later. In this section of the film, everyone approaches Chris to introduce himself, yet there are several subtle and not-so-subtle racial undertones. Chris eventually spots a person of color at the party and approaches him hoping to make a friend. This situation becomes gloomy as Chris observes that the guy is behaving abnormally for a man from Brooklyn. Chris takes a photograph of the person, which drives him insane. The guy attempted to strike Chris and said, “Get out!” (Peele, 2017). After the man’s issues had been resolved, Chris remained unsatisfied.
Chris believed that he and Rose would stroll to cool down and converse while the rest of the group gathered for bingo. Chris can get Rose to go since he is not comfortable. The two hurry back home to pack as everyone departs the party. As Chris and Rose try to exit the residence, things grow tense. Rose cannot locate her keys, and at this moment, Rose admits that she is genuinely attempting to trap Chris. The family induces Chris’s unconsciousness through hypnosis, a technique previously utilized in the film. Rose and her family constantly entrapped black men and women to brainwash them and exploit their bodies to live longer, healthier lives via a specific brain transplant. They saw African-Americans as the most superior human occupants, believing they would be more robust, quicker, and live longer if they inhabited the body of a black person. Chris can fight against and escape them.
Political Significance of the Film
The Framing of Violent Black Resistance
Violent black resistance movements positively impact political and policy change because, as nonviolent protest brings awareness to an issue, violent protest brings urgency to a subject. For instance, through such movements as Black Lives Matter, the culprit of the death of George Floyd, who died at the hands of a rogue white police officer, was sentenced. According to Issar (2021), the Black Lives Matter movement acknowledges racial capitalism as another type of structural oppression. It links the legacies of slavery and imperialism with the modern economic-material quandary of Black populations. In the early phases of the social upheaval after George Floyd’s tragedy, individuals from all walks of life physically and aesthetically challenged the fundamental structure of American civilization to vent their anger through violence (Cappelli, 2020). As such, politically instigated films are a location of countercultural creation that questions and criticizes the socioeconomic and political status quo of black subjugation.
Get Out depicts violent black resistance as a desperate need. As shown by Chris, violent black resistance is depicted as a solution to escaping racial profiling and bigotry. For instance, as Rose, the white girlfriend of Chris, asks him to spend the weekend at her suburban family home, everyone behaves oddly, including her parents, her parents’ white acquaintances, and her family’s black slaves. Chris falls prey to a community-wide scheme to kidnap black men and women and merge their brains with those of elderly white males in a horrifying eugenics experiment. His only alternative is to flee by whatever means required, which, in the case of Get Out, is open, violent black resistance. Chris’ action is consistent with research by Saghafi (2018), who acknowledged that pressure from the public has compelled policing agencies to reform systems of racial injustice and police brutality that have violated the constitutional rights of persons of color.
Get Out uses the concept of the police as a danger instead of a source of safety. This alludes to the recent incidents of police brutality against persons and communities of color (Saghafi, 2018). Similarly, the distorted function of the local police relates to the Sunken Place metaphor for the prison-industrial complex, in which the police play a fundamental role. Despite the unexpected turmoil caused by the police sirens, the audience is relieved to see Chris’ closest friend Rod, the critical comic relief, driving a TSA truck to save him from a racially prejudiced conclusion that he is the cause of Rose’s bleeding in the forest. The fact that Rod, another African-American man, is essential in Chris’s departure further subverts the white savior cliché by rejecting the notion of a black man being rescued by a white person. In any other circumstance, the scenario would have resulted in Chris’s incrimination since biased police officers rushing to the scene would have assumed Chris was the hunter, not the victim.
In some socially sanctioned circumstances, such as wars, specific athletic actions, and self-defense, mainstream American society views violence as heroic. This perspective also primarily applies to American pop culture (Griggs, 2020). Typically, the protagonists in films, television shows, and video games are solitary individuals who use violence to overcome an unfair system. When violence is used as resistance by minorities or the downtrodden, however, American politics and popular culture tend to take a different perspective; violence becomes something to be avoided at all costs (Marchetti, 2022). For instance, Republican legislators voted on legislation to limit big rallies, which civil liberties advocates see as a nationwide assault on protest rights (Iglesias, 2020). Black resistance groups in the United States have been stigmatized and punished for decades for even the slightest suggestion of impending violence. This has been true whether the resistance has taken the shape of groups such as the Black Panthers (Iglesias, 2020). The cultural narrative prohibits black folks from becoming heroic via rebellion.
The above narrative is echoed by Hollywood, promoting the notion that violence is wrong and minorities should only use it to achieve peace and togetherness. Even in the horror genre, which is rife with sanctioned violence, black actors are often only permitted to utilize violence when acting with white characters. Throughout the first two-thirds of the film, Chris remains tactfully quiet despite being subjected to a barrage of casually racist acts; it is evident that he has mastered this tactic via innumerable social encounters. Chris’s quiet is designed to avoid anger and project an image of courtesy and acquiescence. To his detriment, he stays peaceful until the last possible moment.
To contextualize the mounting, life-threatening danger of Chris’s predicament, the film stresses Chris’s rising degrees of terror and his efforts to stay calm and behave appropriately. The mainstream narrative regarding blacks’ efforts to cohabit within the white culture is that the black person is the cause of conflict and the issue that must be resolved. Even when Chris’s struggle against white suburbia intensifies, the viewer stays on Chris’s side due to the horror genre’s conditioning of people to the cliche of the “man attempting to persuade himself that everything is okay when it is not fine” (Peele, 2017). When Chris resorts to violence for the first time, it is cathartic and uplifting, and there is no platitude about peacemaking. In Get Out, black violence is not a transient step toward amalgamation with whites; instead, whites are prejudiced and must be stopped. The film challenges perceptions of real-world black resistance and protest by allowing audience members, even whites, to empathize with this desperation. In this case, Get Out is politically significant in addressing racial discrimination in American society affecting people of color through its protagonist, Chris.
White Micro-aggressions
White microaggressions are mounted as disguising actual dehumanization. The accumulations of routine racial slights that make a person feel excluded constitute microaggressions. According to Wozolek (2018), a ubiquitous psychological technique for exerting influence over someone is convincing them that their perceptions of reality and interpretations of events are incorrect. The notion of gaslighting has gradually reached more significant public awareness from contemporary psychology. It is a prevalent behavior for which people lacked a term until recently (Wozolek, 2018). The employment of microaggressions is one of the most prevalent manifestations of gaslighting (Johnson et al., 2021). According to Johnson et al. (2021), microaggressions is a harmless casual statement or gesture frequently used to denigrate and degrade the experiences and identities of women, minorities, and other oppressed individuals. The strength of microaggressions is that it is often portrayed as accidental ignorance; so, if one reacts negatively to it, one seems oversensitive. It is used to degrade and devalue people’s identities while providing believable denial that may be exploited to make them seem insane.
In Get Out, like in real life, white people’s supposedly harmless remarks about Chris’s color are not harmless. Chris faces a social nightmare: garden parties full of wealthy white people, who violate his space, touch him without his consent, prod him, and use him as a physical and sexual object. They do all this while anticipating his approbation of their humanitarian treatment of black people. However, this is how microaggressions seem; they are remarks and behaviors intended to pass as ignorant while concealing more significant kinds of racism (Johnson et al., 2021). All of the remarks made during the garden party are intended to evaluate Chris as a physical specimen, rating the quality of body parts that will be auctioned off. Even his spiritual traits, such as his artistic aptitude, are expressly reduced to objectified bodily parts; his photographic talent is reduced to his artistic eyes, which are commoditized along with the rest of him. Get Out accurately depicts the benevolent bigotry of the partygoers, a cover for a dehumanization system. As such, through white microaggressions, the film is politically significant in addressing racial discrimination in society.
Furthermore, white microaggressions are seen as metaphors for the physical commoditization of black bodies. By transferring a white person’s mind into the “vessel” of a black body, also known as “The Coagula,” the white characters in the film seek to obtain “super” physical qualities in order to prevent diseases, medical issues, aging, and death. In this manner, the white characters occupy the bodies of the African-Americans Rose takes home to her family against their consent. At several points in the film, focusing on the white characters’ preoccupation with Chris’ body highlights their prejudiced belief that black bodies are genetically superior. In addition, Rose’s father implies that persons of African heritage have more athletic ability when he tells the tale of his father losing to Jesse Owens in the Berlin Olympics of 1936. The Olympic defeat of the Armitage grandfather suggests a deep-seated family fixation with the physicality of black bodies and alludes to the motives behind the transplantation treatments.
Code Switching
Code-Switching is depicted as a means of making white individuals feel at ease. Unnatural artifice placed against a bizarrely dystopian suburban setting is one of the most popular horror tropes (McCluney et al., 2021). It has been used memorably as a remark on feminism and conformity. Get Out likewise employs this trope to illustrate the dangers of conformity but applies it to the particular conformist acts that black men and women engage in daily. Code flipping is adapting one’s speech and mannerisms to various cultural and social circumstances.
Code swapping occurs in many contexts, but in black culture, it is often essential for blending into white-dominated professional and social arenas. Before writing and directing Get Out, Peele regularly addressed code flipping. He employs it here to create one of the film’s creepiest elements: the brainwashing of the previously kidnapped black men and women from Rose’s neighborhood. Chris first feels something is amiss in the community due to the peculiar behavior of its few black residents. They all seem, talk, behave, and dress incredibly strangely, almost anachronistically; they resemble elderly white folks. These men and women have been kidnapped, and their bodies are being utilized as conduits for the brains of old white men and women.
Get Out depicts code-switching as a talent that may work against the self-interests of black men and women since it can make social interactions about the comfort of white people rather than their own. Chris’s code flipping has little effect other than to enhance the risk he faces. Moreover, the terrible medical experiments that quiet the film’s other black victims are an extension of the assimilations that occur in reality when black men and women migrate into white society. At a critical point, one of the brainwashed victims can escape and tell Chris he is in danger. In that instant, he reverts to his former self, and Chris understands that he knows and recognizes him; he is a man Chris used to know who disappeared. This becomes the decisive moment for Chris to realize something is gravely wrong. Detecting code-switching to a more genuine identity becomes a crucial survival skill.
A Literature Review of Systemic Racism
In a post-racial culture, the rise of black filmmakers, directors, and writers portrays colorblindness in film. Patton (2019) argues that the logic of colorblind ideology conceals racism’s role in neoliberalism. According to Patton (2019), the plot and casting of Get Out challenge neoliberal racism in its present form of colorblindness. However, the film also utilizes memory to reconstruct African-American history to oppose other neoliberal methods, such as individualism, equality, and progressivism, which disguise the colonial origins and lasting effects of structural racism (Patton, 2019). As a result, Get Out challenges the common idea that racism has been eradicated as a social-spatial practice in post-racial America.
Understanding the underlying processes of racism is vital for evaluating the difficulties inherent in delivering therapy services when there are many variances. According to Rasmussen and Garran (2019), the ideas of awareness, double consciousness, projection, projective identification, jealousy, and splitting reveal a rich and intricate unconscious dyadic exchange. From American colonial history, deliberate behaviors and policies reinforced disadvantage in all spheres of life, starting with slavery and ending with a drastically inferior position. Unconscious inferences, scientifically demonstrated from impressions forward, indicate non-Black Americans’ genetic associations: connecting Black Americans with negative valences, criminal stereotypes, and low status, including animal rather than human, based on empirical evidence (Rasmussen & Garran, 2019). Implicit racial biases are embedded in non-Black persons’ systems of racist ideas, judgments, and feelings, which predict racialized behavior.
These systemic individuals and interpersonal behaviors persist partly because non-Black individuals lack experience with African-Americans and rely on cultural stereotypes. Black Americans are more diversified than ever owing to perseverance, immigration, and intermarriage, despite institutional difficulties and challenges (Rasmussen & Garran, 2019). Intergroup interaction may highlight the Black variety in opposition to systematic racism, but White advantages continue in all economic, political, and social spheres.
Integrating dynamic reproductions of racist behavior into daily life perpetuates systemic racism. For instance, cultural psychology has sought to study racism as the “emerging product of psychological subjectivity and the structural basis for the dynamic replication of racist conduct” (Salter et al., 2018, p. 151). This dynamic may manifest in the form of individual racist behaviors that are integrated into the fabric of daily life and serve to maintain systemic racism. Interpersonal exchanges connect individual and community conceptions of race. Individual minds that share certain beliefs about one another’s essential identities treat one another following social norms, cultural practices, and cultural scripts. Individual mental representations and social interaction patterns seldom assist Black individuals when interacting with Whites.
The history of racism in the United States of America (US) is comprehensive and heinous. Racism has permeated the nation’s everyday life, policies, venues, economic structures, and social conventions from its inception (Lavalley & Johnson, 2020). The affluent elite employed race to exercise social control over the inhabitants of the English colonies while simultaneously displacing and committing genocide against indigenous peoples, therefore laying the foundation for the hegemonic social reality of the future United States (Lavalley & Johnson, 2020). Governmental policies and legal precedents fashioned societal structures based on ‘whiteness’ and ‘non-whiteness,’ particularly regarding citizenship and its related privileges (Rothstein, 2017). Consequently, practically every element of daily life was shaped by racial identification and prejudice systems.
Conclusion
The video was intended to demonstrate to the public the existence of systematic racism that is politically motivated and affects minority groups, namely people of color. Through violent black resistance movements, white feminism, white microaggressions, and code-flipping, racism is deconstructed in Get Out; hence, politically significant. There is no broad fantasy metaphor in the horror movie; instead, the adverse event is the actual occurrence that was always threatening to be negative. Small social slights and indignities of casual racism are amplified and reinforced and are ultimately shown to hide the most abhorrent form of racism: slavery. The central concept of the film is that its horrors are tangible. In actuality, the politenesses of casual racism—racist conduct that attempts to be aggressively nonthreatening—are deliberate attempts to promote prejudice. Get Out’s ordinary words and deeds are shown to be masking monstrous atrocities since, in real life; these seemingly little acts and phrases are the results of a broader system that devalues human lives.
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