Horrors of Modern Exploitation of Black Bodies in Get Out

I am super late to this party, but I have finally seen Get Out. In addition to being a humorous and thrilling horror movie, It made uncomfortable viewing about white liberal exploitation of black bodies. This post will definitely have major spoils so be warned.

Racism is generally thought of as a malice against other races, or a belief that one particular race is superior to others. The racism of the villains of Get Out is the objectification and exploitation of black bodies that are vulnerable.

Here is a brief recap of the story. Chris, a black man, and his white girlfriend Rose spend the weekend at Rose’s parents’ house in the country. Over the course of Chris’ stay there he meets many rich liberal white people who treat him with uncharacteristic niceness and fascination. He later finds out that Rose’s family uses hypnosis to tale control over black bodies for their own pleasure while the person inside that body in trapped in the helpless “sunken place.

In probably the funniest scene in the movie, Chris navigates a party of almost exclusively order rich white people. There are clear examples in this party of blatant sexualization of black men, the funnier interactions were the ones in which the party goers became extra nice and aggressively mentioning that they would have voted for Obama for a third term or that they had once met Tiger Woods. This treatment is harmful because they reduce Chris to just his skin color. They tell Chris that his body makes them so uncomfortable that they have to treat him differently from other partygoers. After discussing this movie with other people, a disturbing revelation to me as a white person is that Some black people see the sunken place as a good metaphor for how it feels sometimes to live in a world that is hostile to blacks. It is that sometimes horrible and offensive things are said and that all you fell you have the power to do is stand there and think about it later.

Interestingly it is never explained in the film why exactly black people are targeted specifically. It had less done with hatred toward blacks and more with a fascination and their vulnerability. As a viewer it made me uncomfortable to think about how we are entertained every Sunday by black men playing football on tv but do not do enough to protect them from concussions or listen to them when they protest police brutality, or sneer at how much money they make. In politics white liberals objectify black people by reducing them to monolithic democratic vote. I saw that language in the 2016 primary when Bernie Sanders supporters that I knew became frustrated when Bernie had low vote totals from black voters.

                I think this film is an interesting telling of more subtle forms of racism and challenges the viewer to take a closer look at modern forms of black commodification and exploitation.