Film analysis essay

Midwest Modern Language Association

Can One "Get Out?" The Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism Author(s): Ryan Poll Source: The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 51, No. 2 (FALL 2018), pp. 69-102 Published by: Midwest Modern Language Association Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/45151156 Accessed: 15-01-2020 01:42 UTC

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Can One Get Out ? The Aesthetics of

Afro-Pessimism

Ryan Poll

.^¿1 a skit from Delirious

(1983), Eddie Murphy suggests

that the Hollywood horror mov-

ie is a White genre,1 As Murphy

humorously explains, a Black

person who walked into a house

where an apparition appeared or was even hinted at would imme-

diately 'get out," By this logic, fea-

ture-length horror movies playing

at multiplexes (or streaming on

digital devices) are only possi-

ble because of White ignorance.2

Murphy's joke insightfully implies

that White people are incapable

of recognizing that horror can be

enfolded into their everyday lives, that horror can be constitutive of

the everyday. White people do not

see horror until it's too late, which

is another way of saying that for

White people, the experience of

horror is unexpected and contin-

gent, not foundational to their

identity and worldview.

Murphy's joke discloses an

important ideological truth about

the racial politics of the horror

genre. In its dominant form, the

genre works because White people

fundamentally imagine the world

without horror. Yes, such can hap-

pen, but it happens "over there,"

distant from the everyday ontolo-

gy and experience of Whiteness. African Americans, in contrast,

are keenly aware that the world

is pervaded with horror and are

constantly vigilant for signifiers

of such. Murphy's joke posits that

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Ryan Poll

African Americans have developed a sixth sense, one that immediately

intuits if a particular geography is marked by horror or an impending

horror» When this historically developed instinct senses such violence, it

screams for Black subjects to "get out." By this cultural logic, a Black hor-

ror movie, one that follows the dominant genre s codes and conventions,

is an oxymoron. Black protagonists would intuit the impending horror

before the opening act concludes. Murphy s joke, with the punch line "get

out," assumes that for African Americans, there are ways to escape from

American horror, that there are spaces outside of American horror.

In contrast to Murphy's joke, Jordan Peele's 2017 movie Get

Out - a title that echoes Murphy's skit - seems to posit that, for Af-

rican Americans, there is no escape. To be Black in America, Get Out

suggests, is to be trapped within an unending narrative of racialized

terror. For African Americans, horror is not a genre, but a structuring

paradigm. Get Out, in many ways, exemplifies the political philosophy

of Afro-pessimism, a term coined by Saidiya Hartman and elaborated

upon, most prominently, by Frank B. Wilderson, III and Jared Sexton.3

According to Afro-pessimism, the modern world was created by Black

slavery. The world of White Masters and Black Slaves is the world we

have inherited and the world we live in today.

In his important history Slavery and Social Death : A Compara-

tive Study (1982), Orlando Patterson defines slaves as being objects open

to "permanent, violent domination" (13; qtd. in Wilderson 14). For slaves, violence is foundational, the matrix of existence.4 To be a slave is

to be consigned to what Patterson calls "social death." Patterson's ambi-

tious book studies slavery from antiquity to modern times, showing how

the institution changes during different periods, geographies, and polit-

ical-economic conditions. Afro-pessimism borrows some of Patterson's

insights, but in contrast to Patterson, Afro-pessimism argues that Black

slavery is not simply another chapter in the unfolding history of the in-

stitution but the creation of a new world, the creation of modernity, and

the creation, to use Fanons words, of a new "species" (Wretched 40). As

Wilderson powerfully writes, Blacks were created during the Middle

Passage: "Africans went into the ships and came out as Blacks" (38, cap-

italization in original). Blacks remain marked as slaves and live in what

Loïc Wacquant calls the "carcerai continuum" (qtd. in Wilderson 75).

The foundational, genocidal violence that defines and determines Black

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Can One Get Out? The Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism | 71

lives "remains constant, paradigmatically, despite changes in its perfor-

mance' over time - slave ship, Middle Passage, Slave estate, Jim Crow,

the ghetto, and the prison-industrial complex" (Wilderson 75). Or, as

Christina Sharpe writes, modernity is defined by "the reappearances of

the slave ship in everyday life in the form of the prison, the camp, and the

school" (21). To be Black, according to Afro-pessimism, is to be funda-

mentally, ontologically, marked as a slave, whether the year is 1617, 1717,

1817, 1917, or, when Get Out was released in theaters, 2017, one year re-

moved from the historic tenure of the first Black president, a presidency

that for many White liberals, was celebrated as indubitable evidence of

the United States' social progress. In contrast, Afro-pessimists assert

that the great fiction of Whiteness is to posit and perpetuate the ideo-

logical narrative of social progress, to believe that we are post-racialized

slavery. The "pessimism" in the political philosophy's title is an "honest

description" of the seeming impossibility "of racial justice or equality in

the world today" (Shingavi 08:05-08:14).

Afro-pessimism insists that racialized slavery structures the

contemporary. This theory is at the center of Get Out , a movie about

American slavery, produced and distributed during a period in which

slave movies have proliferated. In 2012, five years prior to the release of

Get Out , two prominent Hollywood slave narratives were distributed:

Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained and Steven Spielberg's Lincoln .

The following year, 2013, was dubbed "the Year of the Slavery Film," in

which a total of seven US movies about American slavery were slated

to be distributed, including most prominently Steve McQueen's Os-

car-winning 12 Years a Slave (2013).5 Film historian Donald Bogle re-

flected, "It's difficult not to question the timing of these films and what

it really means" (qtd. in Samuels). Movies about African slavery multi-

plied during the historic presidency of Barack Obama. While President

Obama seemed to offer a concrete image that anything is possible in

the United States - that the violences of the past do not structure the

present - funding for American movies and television shows about slav-

ery reached new heights, allowing for the remake of Roots (2016), The

Birth of a Nation (2016), Free State of Jones (2016), and Underground

(2016-201 7). Ava DuVernay, one of the most important filmmakers of

this generation - the director and writer or co-writer of Middle of No-

where (2012), Selma (2014), and 13th (2016) - offered perhaps the most

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Ryan Poll

persuasive account of why so many feature-length films about slavery

were being produced in the first few years of Obama's presidency» Du-

Vernay theorized,

To be frank, I think there's more of a comfort level with

looking at black people in hindsight as far as film goes

» » . I'm more likely to get permission-based money to

make a film on us living in the past than of black people

living, loving, and being ourselves in the present day.

Tally up the films of the past 10 years, aside from Mr.

[Tyler] Perry and you'll find an imbalance between

contemporary and historical cinematic images of black

people. And let's not talk about future images. When

was the last time you saw a black feature film set in

space?" (qtd. in Samuels)

Get Out is about Black people in the present. And it is also about

slavery. Of all the slave movies produced in the past decade, Get Out is

perhaps the most radical. It narrates how American slavery is not an

institution confined to the past, nor one locatable in a particular region

(such as the South), but a national institution, practice, and affect that

continues to shape and structure the present. While African American

scholars, critics, and audience members understood the historical im-

portance and significance of Get Out,6 many White critics read the mov-

ie as about Whiteness. Victoria Anderson astutely observes, "the only

thing more scary than the film are some of the reviews." She elaborates,

Many reviews . . . describe Get Out exclusively as a satire

on white liberal elitism, one which asks (white) viewers

to "check their privilege." But they are, perhaps, reading

it from just such a privileged perspective. In so doing,

they unwittingly repeat the dynamics parodied in the

film, invalidating the black experience and ignoring the

possibility that the film might not be primarily about

the experience of whiteness, nor created specifically for the edification of white audiences.

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Can One Get Out? The Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism | 73

In the "prestige economy" of Whiteness (English), Get Out was grossly

misread and miscategorized. When the nominees for the 2018 Golden

Globes were announced, Get Out was, as expected, nominated for "Best

Picture." However, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association recog-

nized Get Out as a "comedy" rather than a "drama." Get Out was placed

in a category competing with The Greatest Showman and The Disaster

Artist, rather than as a "drama" competing against Three Billboards Out-

side Ebbing, Missouri and Call Me by Your Name (Tapley). In response,

Jordan Peele tweeted, "'Get Out' is a documentary" (@JordanPeele).7

What White reviewers and the prestige economy disavow is

that Peek's feature-length debut is about racialized slavery in the pres-

ent. Get Out narrates how slavery remains a central paradigm to under-

standing the here and now, a central tenet of Afro-pessimism. As this

article argues, Peeles movie narrates the deep truth of Afro-pessimism.

Moreover, it also gestures toward ways out of this seemingly historical

fixity, lhe way out, the movie suggests, is by aesthetics. Radical Black aesthetics.

Geographies of Everyday Horror From the beginning, Get Out foregrounds the intertwined re-

lationship of aesthetics, race, and racism. When the movie begins, the

geography of horror from which Black subjects must "get out" is sub-

urbia. In the opening frame, we see a quiet, sleeping, suburban street,

a geography zoned exclusively for single-family homes. Functioning

streetlights emit a soft yellow glow, lawns are manicured, and all cars are

parked in driveways. A deep silence blankets this geography with only a

gentle chirping of crickets in the distance. All the homes are shrouded in

darkness, following the rhythms of monied time in which night means

time for sleep, not the time for a second or third or fourth job to make

ends meet. Even though not a single person is visible on screen, popular

culture has aesthetically trained us how to read this geography zoned

exclusively for residential purposes: this is a zone of and for Whiteness.

In another movie, in a White movie, this could be an innocu-

ous, establishing shot. But in a movie wrestling with the United States'

legacy of race and racism, this suburban street is immediately recogniz-

able as a site of horror for the lone Black millennial, Andre Hayworth

(Lakeith Stanfield), who attempts to navigate this geography, which he

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Ryan Poll

calls a "maze." This opening shot reverses the racist logic that if you see a

Black man walking at night, the correct affect is "fear" and the correct in-

stinct is "flight," Instead, and more truthfully, it is Black men who should

be afraid while walking alone in a White zone, Andre crosses into a

White space, a geography rich with resources and goods. This space of

flourishing life for Whites is a space of horror for Black and Brown bod-

ies who enter without conforming to a particular racialized and classed

script. If people of color are to enter this White zone, they must enter

as domestic helpers, maintenance workers, lawn-care workers - work-

ing-class subjects who perform services and deliver goods that allow this

zone to thrive. Moreover, people of color should enter during "working

hours." This geography can be understood as a contemporary sundown town.

Real history and reel history have trained us how to read this

geography. Beginning in the 1940s, the United States' racial geography,

especially in the North, was reorganized and transformed due to fed-

eral policies, working in concert with local governments and real estate

developers, encouraging and incentivizing White Americans to relocate

to a newly created and expanding geography: suburbia. This radical

transformation was a response, in large part, to the Great Migration.

After decades of legalized segregation, humiliation, discrimination,

and terror, African Americans revolted against the South. Lured by the

promise of better-paying jobs, housing opportunities, better schools,

the protected right to participate politically, and the promise of liber-

ty and equality, African Americans migrated from the rural South to

the urban North in one of the largest internal migrations in US history

(Berlin 152-200). While African Americans largely settled in urban centers, White Americans, in response, fled to newly manufactured

suburbs, which were advertised as homogeneous spaces where White-

ness could be maintained, practiced, and reproduced, uncontaminated

by Blackness. The promise of racial homogeneity, which is a promise of

racial segregation, interpellated millions of White Americans. In twen-

tieth-century America, affirmative action was White, and suburbia be-

came code for Whiteness (Freund; Jackson; Rothstein).

This history has been reinforced by popular culture, especially

in the dominant horror genre. In Horror Noire : Blacks in American Hor-

ror Films from the 1890s to Present (2011), Robin R. Means Coleman

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Can One Get Out? The Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism | 75

documents how horror movies in the second half of the twentieth cen-

tury widely represented and perpetuated the ideology of suburbia as a

White geography. Horror movies in the late 1970s and 1980s that were

set in suburbia - those consumed by a young Peele - represented Black-

ness in the negative. Suburbia was imagined and cast as an all-White

space. Coleman offers an extensive list of suburban horror movies in

which not a single Black character appears, including Halloween (1978);

Amityville Horror (1979); Halloween II (1981); Poltergeist (1982); and

Critters (1986) (146). All these movies, and so many more, perpetuate

the ideology that suburbs, first and foremost, are White spaces and that

once the threatening "monster" is removed, White normativity can be restored.8

In the feature commentary that accompanies the digital HD,

Blu-ray, and DVD, Peele explains that he wanted the opening of Get

Out to echo classic late twentieth-century American (and we should

add White) horror films, such as Jaws (1975) and Halloween (19 78).

However, these cultural tropes are resignified due to Andre's body. The

very first moments of the movie may echo Halloween in which we see an

empty, quiet suburban street at night. But this trope is refigured when

Andre walks into the frame. In contrast to Halloween , where the fear is

pervasive and in which anyone within the geography is vulnerable (al-

though especially women [Clover]), in Get Out, the horror is racialized.

This opening sequence does not trope suburbia as an unsafe space for

everyone; rather, it reaffirms that suburbia is a safe space - unless you're

a person of color.

While Get Out's opening echoes prominent horror tropes, more

powerfully it echoes recent history; specifically, the murder of Tray von

Martin, whose crime was walking in a predominately White suburb,

armed with a bag of Skittles and a can of Arizona juice. Get Out, in other

words, begins with the specific everyday terror of being Black in Amer-

ica, where in any space, especially spaces coded as White, one's body is

vulnerable and killable. From the onset, Get Out plunges us into two

nonsynchronous contexts: the horror genre and contemporary history,

an unfolding that exceeds the confines of any (White) genre. As Andre

walks onto the scene of Whiteness, he speaks on his cell phone, and we

are privy only to his end of the conversation. This dialogue is presented

as a fragmented monologue in which we hear and feel Andre's mount-

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Ryan Poll

ing anxiety, which he initially tries to mask with humor. He says to the

unseen and unheard auditor that they are guiding him into a "creepy,

confusing ass suburb." Andre's deliverance of this line is telling. When

he articulates the word "suburb," he modulates his voice, performing a

stereotypical White accent, drawing out the second syllable "urb" in a

mock, Valley-girl style. But this humor gives way to a différent, more

urgent tone. Despite this attempt at humor, Andre insists he's being "se-

rious," and that he "sticks out like a sore thumb." Andre knows how to

read this geography: he has entered a geography zoned for Whiteness,

part of a larger national structure of "resegregation" that determines ev-

erything from housing, employment, healthcare, education, and overall

quality of life (Chang 1-8).

Everything in this scene is anxiety producing: the homes, the

(unseen) people within the homes, and the (unseen) police patrolling

and protecting these homes. The threat of violence is everywhere for this

young Black man lost in a geography of Whiteness. This opening scene

illustrates that Fanons theory of geography remains an important par-

adigm for understanding the neoliberal present. To return to Fanon -

who is widely recognized as a foundational voice of Afro-pessimism

(Wilderson 31) - is to recognize the centrality of geography to main-

taining and perpetuating modern, colonial racism. As Fanon theorizes,

colonial modernity is structured by distinct and segregated racialized

"zones." These zones separate Whites from Blacks, which is another

way of saying Masters from Slaves or Humans from Non-Humans. In

The Wretched of the Earth , Fanon describes the "colonial world" as di-

vided into two racialized "zones" (38-39). In each zone lives a different

"species." In White zones, Humans flourish; and in the "Other" zone, a

new "species" is contained: the Black, the Colonized, the Slave (40). The

zones of colonial Whiteness disproportionally and conspicuously con-

sume a vast majority of the world s resources, services, and goods and are

replete with well-funded institutions that allow and encourage individ-

uals to achieve their maximum capacity for rich, meaningful, and cre-

ative lives; this zone fosters the ideology of individualism. Here is how

Fanon describes zones of Whiteness: "It is . . . brightly lit . . . ; the streets

are covered with asphalt, and the garbage cans swallow all the leavings,

unseen, unknown and hardly thought about. . . . [It] is a well-fed town,

an easygoing town; its belly is always full of good things." ( Wretched

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Can One Get Out? Hie Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism | 77

39). This description can be applied to many monied, overwhelmingly

White geographies, such as the one that opens Get Out

White zones are spaces where life prospers; Black zones are

spaces of social death. This hypersegregation is the cultural logic of the

modern United States. In We Gon' Be Alright : Notes on Race and Reseg-

regation (2016), Jeff Chang argues that the United States is more racially

and economically segregated now than in the 1960s, when the Federal

Government explicitly addressed US apartheid.9 Ruth Wilson Gilmore

defines racism as how different racialized groups are differently vulner-

able "to premature death," both by explicit state violence and by more

implicit structures of violence (28; qtd. in Chang 3). Chang succinctly

summarizes, "Racism kills" (4). To cite one metric that illustrates this

material truth, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention define

premature death as dying before the age of seventy-five; the premature

death rate for African Americans is more than 50 percent higher than

for Whites and higher than the rate for all other ethnic groups, with the

exception of some Indigenous Americans (Chang 4). Racism is about

access to resources, goods, and services. Racism, in other words, is in-

extricable from capitalism. As Afro-pessimism emphasizes, Whiteness

and capitalism are intertwined and inseparable. Fanon writes, "In the

colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause

is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white

because you are rich" ( Wretched 40). And you are rich and White be-

cause you live in a particular "zone" where life is nurtured and expected

to flourish in beautiful, meaningful ways.

As Andre enters the zone of Whiteness, he encounters an all

too familiar horror for African Americans: a car begins to follow him.

(The car's white color is not accidental; the movie is awash in Whiteness.

In one of the final scenes, one of the central White characters sits on

her bed, wearing a white top, drinking white milk, and listening to the

song "The Time of My Life," the whitest of songs.) In the feature com-

mentary, Peele said he wanted the car to function similarly to the great

white shark in Jaws . While this echo works on one level, on another,

Peele makes audiences aware of how this analogy fails. The shark in the

original Jaws is indifferent to the gender, sex, ethnicity, and race of its

victims. This metaphoric shark, however, is racially motivated, hunting for Black victims.

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This opening scene of an innocent Black millennial being

stalked and targeted because of his skin color uncannily echoes the

murder of Tray von Martin. To avoid any possible confrontation, Andre

mumbles to himself, "Not today; not me," turns around, and walks in

the opposite direction. However, escape proves impossible: Andre is as-

saulted and kidnapped by the White driver. And with no witnesses and

no smart phones to capture this scene of racialized violence, he becomes

another anonymous Black person gone "missing," an incident unlikely to

even be mentioned on the local news, let alone at the regional or national scale. But art ventures where other discourses refuse to tread.

Before following this white car, I want to draw attention to

Peele's aesthetics in framing this scene. The scene unfolds, until the very

end, with a long tracking shot that exceeds two minutes. The camera

closely follows Andre - later rebranded "Logan King," once he is made

into a slave - as he wanders into this zone of Whiteness. This extended,

uninterrupted shot calls attention to itself and formally echoes other

cinematic masterpieces that open with a long tracking shot replete with

swooping and swerving camera motions, such as Orson Welles 's Touch

of Evil (1958), Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend (19 67), Robert Altman's

The Player (1992), and, from the year prior to Get Out's release, Damien

Chazelle's La La Land (2016). In all these examples, the opening se-

quences are praised for their aesthetic brilliance. But what Peele offers,

I want to suggest, is a scene of an intentionally failed aesthetics. That

is, Peele foregrounds the profound and perhaps impossible challenges

of aesthetically representing the systemic horror of anti-Black violence.

As emphasized above, Andre is not a stereotypical horror-mov-

ie victim who is profoundly ignorant of the impending danger. From the

onset, Andre is anxious about being in this White zone. He knows the

racialized dangers are real. But despite this woke state, he can't imagine

the systemic, racialized violence he will encounter: being kidnapped in

order to be made a slave. Andre's limited wokeness is reinforced by the

movie's opening aesthetics. A little over the two-minute mark, a White

assailant assaults Andre and drags him to a white car. Just as the assail-

ant is going to shove Andre into the trunk, the camera's long tracking

shot abruptly stops. In an unexpected cut, the camera ceases following

Andre's kidnapped body and retreats back a considerable distance. For

a camera that was prominently defined by its mobility and fluidity, sud-

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Can One Get Out? The Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism | 79

denly, it remains affixed in one spot as the car speeds into the distance,

heading toward a modern-day plantation. The camera, in other words,

fails to capture the full horror of this violence. The credits begin to un-

furl as the car drives away from the camera, which remains shackled

to one spot, I want to insist that this is an intentional, self-conscious

failure. Peek's intentional aesthetic failure foregrounds the challenges

of how to aesthetically represent the systemic, pervasive racism that still

structures and defines the United States. Reading this framing allegori-

cally, the cameras position symbolizes the inability of Andre - and later

the movie's protagonist - to read how the structure of racialized slavery

determines Black lives. From the opening moments, Get Out asks us to

consider what kind of aesthetics could successfully foreground how ra-

cialized slavery continues to structure the contemporary. This question

of aesthetics - of the politics of aesthetics - is explored explicitly with

the movie's protagonist, Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya).

Staying Woke in an Era of "Post-Blackness" Chris, an African American millennial, is not a typical horror

protagonist defined by ignorance and naivety about the myriad horrors

that exist and shape the world. Rather, when we first meet Chris, he is

introduced as "woke," a state of awareness initially signified by his art.

As the opening credits unfold, we see Chris's black-and-white photo-

graphs hanging on his apartment walls. Before seeing Chris, we see how

he views and frames the world. We meet the movie's central character,

in other words, through his aesthetic practices. These photographs rep-

resent and celebrate Black life flourishing in Black spaces, photographs

that intimately depict everyday Black life in urban America. These pho-

tographs suggest that Chris is a woke subject, a theme reinforced and

made explicit by the non-diegetic soundtrack. When we first see Chris,

we hear Childish Gambino's song "Redbone," the chorus of which re-

peats the phrase "stay woke." The repeated phrase emphasizes how wo-

keness is not a settled condition but rather, a verb, a process, a continual education of how to read new mutations and formations of US racism

from the structural and institutional to the everyday and banal.

To be woke is to recognize and critique the dangerous racial fic-

tions framed by the dominant White culture: the fiction that we live in a

"postracial society" rather than one that is fundamentally shaped by rac-

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ism; the fiction of racism being understood as the exception rather than

the norm; the fiction that racism is a Southern epidemic rather than a

national one; and the fiction of racism predominately existing in its most

spectacular forms (the KKK, neo-Nazis, Donald Trump) rather than

a practice that is ordinary and everyday» Because we are introduced to

Chris through his Black-centered photography, which is overlaid with a

soundtrack that repeats the phrase "stay woke," Get Out suggests from

the onset that becoming and staying woke, in large part, is a project of aesthetics»

However, a paradox emerges. If Chris is woke, then why does he

not recognize that he is in the midst of a horror narrative until it's nearly

too late? As the movie narrates, Chris's woke consciousness is greatly limited. For all of Chris's assumed awareness of structural and institu-

tional racism, he still cant imagine the worst: that slavery remains active

in the present and that Blacks remain marked as slaves. Just as the movie

opens with an intentional example of failed aesthetics - the camera un-

able to follow the white car to the modern-day slave plantation - so too

does Chris exemplify a different aesthetic failure: the dangerous lure of

"post-Blackness."

Despite his ostensibly woke consciousness, Chris does not rec-

ognize that he is within a narrative of modern slavery. Instead, he be-

lieves, or so it seems, that he is in a narrative of post-Blackness. And in

many ways, Chris seems to exemplify and embody post-Blackness. He

is a professional photographer, he lives in a hipster-posh apartment in

what appears to be gentrified Brooklyn, and he has a White girlfriend.

When the movie opens, Chris and Rose Armitage (Allison Williams)

have been dating for several months. What initially drives the narrative

is Rose taking Chris to meet her parents in what appears to be rural, up-

state New York. This meeting increases the possibility that their future will be intertwined and their families blended. If we read Chris Wash-

ington as a "woke, post-Black" millennial, then such could mean, in part,

to be awoken and liberated from the nightmare of US racist history and

from any restrictive role of what it means to be authentically "Black."

Chris is "rooted in, but not restricted by," his race (Dyson xiii).

Tellingly, post-Blackness has its roots in aesthetics. The term

was developed by Thelma Golden, director of Studio Museum in Har-

lem, and Glenn Ligon, a conceptual artist, to describe "the liberating

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Can One Get Out? The Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism | 81

value in tossing off the immense burden of race-wide representation,

the idea that everything they do must speak to or for or about the

entire race" (Touré 29).10 What began as an aesthetic project morphed

into a philosophical and political one. Philosopher Paul C. Taylor

writes that post-Blackness has its origins in "the widespread sense that

racial conditions have taken on novel configurations, and that old con-

ceptions of a stable black identity cannot countenance or illuminate

this novelty" (18). The "widespread" feeling for African Americans in

the early twenty-first century was that blackness had become "a ques-

tion, an object of scrutiny, a provisional resource at best, and for some,

a burden" (Taylor 18).

Perhaps the most popular account of post-Blackness as a pe-

riodizing term and as a new plastic subject position is Touré 's 2011

Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now . For the

book, Touré interviewed 105 African American professionals in a range

of fields to emphasize that "Blackness" is not a singular, homogeneous,

knowable identity. In fact, what defines contemporary African Ameri-

cans are the ways in which they are not tethered to ideas and ideologies of Blackness.

For generations, African Americans have been defined by the

traumas of racialized slavery and its aftermath. But as Touré argues,

in this new "era of Post-Blackness," the past no longer structures (117).

Touré writes, "Black trauma that attended previous generations . . . does

not visit my generation in quite the same way" (21). He continues,

My parents grew up in segregation with laws and

society arrayed to attempt to keep them boxed in to

niggerdom. Blacks had to fight a civil war - which, in

many battles, was an armed insurrection - in order

to become full citizens. Through the Civil Rights and

Black Power struggles many - not all but many - of

those visible and invisible chains were broken. I grew

up in an integrated world without racist laws holding

me back. (21)

According to Touré, no longer does the United States' brutal, systemic

regime of anti-Black racism determine African American lives. Touré's

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periodization is confirmed by all 105 African Americans interviewed

for the book» Duke Law Professor Wahneema H. Lubiano, for example,

claims, 'Post-Black is what it looks like when you're no longer caught by

your own trauma about racism and the history of Black people in the

United States" (qtd. in Touré 21).11

Today, "Blackness" has become an expansive, capacious, and

plastic category. In fact, as Touré implies, the term is anachronistic.

"Blackness" is an ideology tethered to the past, not one that helps us

understand the rich, diverse, and unpredictable paths of actual, mate-

rial Black lives. At the center of this new conception of African-Amer-

ican possibility and becoming is Barack Obama. (Touré's book was

researched, written, and published during Obamas first presidential

term.) Throughout Who s Afraid of Post-Blackness ?, Obama is posi-

tioned as the paragon of post-Blackness and as a structuring princi-

ple. The penultimate chapter is entitled "How to Build More Baracks"

and in his introduction to the book, Michael Eric Dyson begins with a

meditation on Obamas symbolic power. Reflecting on Obama, Dyson

comes up with a phrase that becomes a tenet of post-Blackness: African

Americans are "rooted in, but not restricted by . . . [their] Blackness"

(xiii). This is the phrase I used to describe Chris above, and this phrase

is repeated and championed by Touré. In the first chapter, Touré writes,

"Post-Black means we are like Obama: rooted in but not restricted by

Blackness" (12). If a Black man could become president of the United

States, then anything is seemingly possible.

Post-Blackness means a break from the past, a refusal to be

haunted by the ghosts of racial ized slavery and US apartheid. And it

also means a break from notions of collectivity central to radical Black

politics. Instead, it celebrates individualism, as exemplified by Touré's

first chapter, entitled "Forty Million Ways to Be Black." This concept

comes from Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the director of Harvard's Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. As Gates tells

Touré, "My first line in my class . . . and the last line twelve weeks later

is if there are forty million Black Americans then there are forty million

ways to be Black" (Touré 5). Gates denies the notion of a Black essence,

Black center, or any such thing as Black authenticity. Elaborating upon

Gates, Touré writes, "We are in a post-Black era where the number of

ways of being Black is infinite. Where the possibilities for an authen-

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Can One Get Out? The Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism | 83

tic Black identity are boundless. Where what it means to be Black has

grown so staggeringly broad, so unpredictable, so diffuse that Blackness

itself is undefinable" (20). Glenn Ligon, who helped coin the concept

of post-Blackness, explains that the concept means "a more individu-

alized notion of Blackness." Ligon continues, "I just think we're getting

beyond the collective notion of what Blackness was" (qtd. in Touré 25).

Whereas previous generations were defined by anti-Black racism and formed collectivities to defeat and liberate themselves from the chains of

racial slavery, segregation, and other forms of racial inequality, millen-

nial African Americans, such as Chris Washington in Get Out, are de-

fined by their individualism. In this context, individualism means being

liberated from histories and collectivities organized by signifiers such

as "Blackness"; and such liberation becomes a mark of social progress.

Get Out begins, or so it seems, by affirming post-Blackness. The

interracial couple at the narrative center symbolizes the nation's racial

progress. Chris and Rose appear as a model couple of the millennial gen-

eration, the most racially diverse generation in US history (Frey). When

we first meet the couple, their narrative echoes Stanley Kramer's Guess

Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), which premiered fifty years earlier. At

the beginning of both movies, a White woman brings her Black lover to

her childhood home; in both movies, the White woman has refused to

tell her family that her partner is Black; and in both movies, the White

woman assures her Black partner that there's nothing to worry about

because her parents are liberal. Both White women appear post-ra-

cial, and both have parents, especially fathers, who are self-identified

as bleeding-heart liberals. In Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, the father

(Spencer Tracy) is an editor of a San Francisco newspaper known for

his outspoken liberalism. At home, he keeps a framed picture of FDR

on his desk, a conspicuous symbol of liberalism at the time. In Get Out,

Rose reassures Chris that her parents are proud liberals who would have

voted for Obama a third term, a line that repeats multiple times as if

White support for Obama (or FDR) makes one a bona fide ally.

On the surface, signs of racial progress are everywhere in Get

Out, from Obama's presidency to the interracial couple at the narrative's

center. And indeed, it's difficult to deny the racial progress that has de-

veloped during the fifty-year span between the premiere of Look Who's

Coming to Dinner and the premiere of Get Out, especially if we focus on

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how love is defined and legislated» In 1967, the year Kramer s film was re-

leased, interracial marriage was still illegal in seventeen states: Alabama,

Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississip-

pi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee,

Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. It wasn't until June 12, 1967 (now

known as "Loving Day"), that the Supreme Court ruled that anti-mis ce-

genation laws were unconstitutional in the landmark Loving v. Virginia

decision (Pascoe). If Guess Who's Coming to Dinner initially appears as a

roadmap for Get Out , then we should remember that despite the initial

tension and racism expressed by Katharine Houghton's family toward

Sidney Poitier, by the movie's end, love triumphs over hate. Initially, Get

Out appears to be following the same narrative trajectory. But Get Out

isn't a love story. It's a narrative of horror that reveals the insidious mask

of liberalism and the foundational lie of post-Blackness. Although Get

Out may initially seem like a movie that follows the genre codes of a love

story, from the beginning, significant cracks threaten this genre identi- fication.

Even if Chris appears as post-Black, from the movie's opening

moments, his identity remains anchored to the history, ideology, and

lived reality of Blackness. Chris does not embrace the prospect of meet-

ing Rose's family because he knows what happens when a Black man en-

ters a predominately White space. He knows that his body will become

a spectacle to stare at, interrogate, fetishize, and discursively debase and

degrade. He knows that by entering a White space, he will cease to exist

as Chris Washington an individual - one of the defining attributes of

post-Blackness - and instead, become a fungible Black man, a stereo-

type, a figure without history or ontology. Chris knows this, but this

knowledge, this mounting unease, is not shared with his girlfriend. At

the movie's beginning, he protects her Whiteness rather than giving

voice to his Black vulnerability and anxiety. Although Chris softly pro-

tests about going on this trip to meet her parents, his protests are meek

and unheard. He acquiesces and becomes a passenger, literally and fig-

uratively, to Rose's plan. Chris believes he knows where the narrative is

heading. He has no delusions of the racism and the barrage of microag-

gressions he will encounter in a predominately White space. But Chris

does not anticipate the narrative direction; he does not suspect that he's

in the midst of a slave narrative. Rose is not an ally, but a slave catcher

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Can One Get Out? The Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism | 85

using the guise of intimacy and love to lure young Black men and women into an institution of White Masters and Black Slaves«

Rose takes Chris to the rural, isolated estate of the Armitage

family. This estate, where Rose was born and raised, is a conspicuous

symbol of Whiteness and wealth. While on this estate, Chris expe-

riences, as expected, continuous microaggressions and the everyday

racism that defines the lives of so many African Americans. But what

Chris doesn't recognize until it's nearly too late is that this White es-

tate is a modern-day slave plantation. And the commodities churned

out on this modern-day plantation are Black bodies: specifically, Black

millennial, many of whom imagined themselves, we can assume, in

narratives of post-Blackness. Following a fixed script, Rose dates Af-

rican American millennial and eventually, as with Chris, takes them

to meet her family, a seemingly next step in a progressive narrative of

love. Her "partners" agree to this journey, it is implied, because they

believe that they're in a post-Black narrative, a narrative where meet-

ing a White family is becoming the new norm of a changing United

States. But this post-Black narrative is a lie. Rose helps set in motion

a plan where Black bodies are kidnapped, terrorized, and turned into

slaves for White exploitation, White enjoyment, and White life more

generally. The reason Chris and dozens of other millennial African

Americans before him don't "get out" until it's too late - or in Chris's

case, nearly too late - is because they cannot imagine that racialized

slavery remains alive and active in contemporary America. This inabil-

ity to recognize that Black slavery structures modernity is the unac-

knowledged hallmark of post-Blackness.12

Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism

If Chris's wokeness is announced and exemplified by his aes-

thetic practices - specifically his photography - then it is troubling that

his aesthetics can be appropriated by Whiteness. At the Armitage es-

tate, a throng of White people gather to see Chris and assault him with

a barrage of microaggressions: Is it true what they say about Black people

in the bedroom ? Do you like golf? I once met Tiger Woods . Chris gets away

from this typical White racism and stumbles upon a blind man, who sits

apart from the crowd. The blind man's physical distancing may initially

be read as an ideological distancing from the crowd's racism. Moreover,

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the mans visual impairment may make him seem post-racial. He lit-

erally cannot see race. In fact, this blind man immediately announces

himself as an ally. His first words are "ignorance," recognizing that the

White people at this party are defined by their aggressive ignorance.

As he states, "they mean well but they have no idea what real people go

through." Their unintentional racism is rooted in their distance from

the lives and experiences of "real people," who, we can assume, are work-

ing-class individuals of all races, ethnicities, creeds, genders, and sexual-

ities. (Of course, even if this were true, as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva argues,

racism can still thrive without racists.) The blind man introduces him-

self as Jim Hudson and surprises Chris by disclosing that he is familiar

with Chris's photography: "I am an admirer of your work. You have a

great eye." Of course, Jim cannot experience Chris's aesthetics directly.

Rather, it must be explained through a seeing (most likely White) in-

terpreter. This exchange takes on explicit metaphoric registers: Chris's

aesthetics must be mediated through White sensibilities and White in- stitutions.

Jim calls Chris's photography "brutal" and "melancholic," and

these two adjectives seem to capture the spirit of Chris's aesthetics. As

Chris hears this appreciation and understanding, the bond between the

two seems to strengthen. This aesthetic praise is potentially life-chang-

ing because Jim is the owner of "Hudson Galleries," an institution that

Chris knows and respects. Jim's praise is a stamp of legitimation from a

dominant voice in the art world. Such institutional legitimation means

everything to Chris. Placing this scene in a wider historical context re-

veals that African Americans have been systemically excluded from par-

ticipating in the modern art world, structurally foreclosed from being

aesthetic agents and actors. As Paul C. Taylor writes, "One of the main

elements and instruments of white supremacist modes of social organi-

zation has been the distortion of opportunity structures and exclusion

from social institutions, including the institutions of the art world" (49).

In her important, wide-ranging study of how White supremacy prac-

tices and perpetuates Black invisibility, Michele Wallace critiques "the

still-segregated economy of the gallery and museum world" (qtd. in Tay-

lor 73nl9). For Jim to express admiration of Chris's work is a monumen-

tal gesture, a potential bridge across the racial divide that still defines and dominates the art world.

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Can One Get Out? The Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism | 87

But of course, Jim is not an ally. As part of a contemporary slave

network, he plans to bid on and buy Chris's body. More specifically, Jim

wants to own and control Chris's eyes, to possess Chris's aesthetics.

This appropriation broaches several important questions. What does

it mean that a Black photographer committed to aesthetically repre-

senting Black urban life can be both appreciated and appropriated by

Whiteness? Even more, what does it mean that Chris's ostensibly woke

aesthetics can be useful for the project of White supremacy and Black

dehumanization? Conversely - and to paraphrase Walter Benjamin - what would it mean to create a Black aesthetics that would be "useless"

to White supremacy? Which is to say, what would a radical Black aes-

thetics that could not be appropriated by Whiteness look like? The an-

swer to the last two questions is Afro-pessimism.

While the majority of Get Out unfolds through Chris's point

of view - one that can be appropriated by Whiteness - one prominent

scene resists the project of Whiteness. This scene, tellingly, exemplifies

the philosophy of Afro-pessimism. I am referring to perhaps the most

important scene in the movie, one that introduces the metaphor-concept

of the "sunken place."

The owners of the plantation, Dean (Bradley Whitford) and

Missy Armitage (Catherine Keener), both work on radically restructur-

ing Black minds and bodies. Dean is a neurosurgeon, who perpetuates a

medical practice perfected by his father: the ability to transplant White

minds into Black bodies. For two generations, the Armitage family has

been practicing and expanding this new form of Black slavery. Rose's

brother, Jeremy, a White nationalist, is training to be a neuroscientist in

order to carry on this tradition. Dean promotes the ideology of scientif-

ic racism, the belief that Whites are naturally superior to non-Whites

and that different races have different genetic strengths. According to

this ideology, Whites have superior minds - a greater capacity for rea-

soning and rationality - and Blacks have superior bodies, an attribute

that makes them closer to nonhuman animals. The ideology of scientific

racism is hypostasized by Dean's medical practice, which literalizes the

belief of White mental superiority and Black physical superiority and

how the latter is ideologically posited to serve the purposes and plea- sures of the former.

If Dean is a metaphor for scientific racism, then Missy can be

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understood as a metaphor for ideology* Missy, a therapist, hypnotiz-

es and brainwashes Black victims* Both Dean and Missy work on and

refigure Black bodies in material ways* While under Missy's noncon-

sensual hypnosis, Chris's consciousness becomes radically refigured.

In Peele's representation of Black consciousness, Chris's interiority be-

comes an expanding, seemingly infinite deep space through which Chris

free-falls in slow motion. As Chris helplessly plummets into deep space,

he looks up and sees Missy* While Chris drops into the expanding well

of his body, Missy stays in place, watching Chris descend beyond sight

and sound. Chris falls into the "sunken place," a powerful metaphor of

White supremacy that visualizes the hierarchical relationship between

White Masters and Black Slaves* The White subject is at the top and

the Black subject descends into a deep, dark sunken hole, which makes them unseen and unheard in the world of Whiteness*

The sunken place, I want to suggest, complicates Du Bois's

well-traveled theory of "double consciousness*"13 As Du Bois powerful-

ly and famously theorizes, White racism is both an external network

of institutions and an ideology that becomes internalized by African

Americans. In Du Bois's canonical theory, the Black mind is violently

and dangerously divided due to White racism. White racism fractures

the Black mind into two antagonistic factions: "It is a peculiar sensa-

tion, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self

through the eyes of others" (Du Bois 3). "The eyes of others," of course, is

the eyes of Whiteness that undergird a colonial way of seeing, framing,

and knowing the world. The eyes of Whiteness become internalized and

housed within the Black subject. What becomes internalized, in other

words, are the eyes of the Master, who still sees Blacks as subhumans,

as slaves. But this White colonization is not totalizing* Instead, in Du

Bois's metaphor-concept, it is battled by an opposing, resisting Black consciousness* If the White or Master consciousness is one of dehu-

manization and disempowerment, then the resisting consciousness can

be understood as a form of Black empowerment that affirms Black agen-

cy* As Du Bois writes, Black consciousness and White consciousness

are "two warring ideals" (3), imagery that posits combat between two

equal antagonists*

Du Bois's theory is predicated on a spatial metaphor: Black consciousness is posited as equal to the internalized consciousness of

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Can One Get Out? The Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism | 89

White supremacy. Du Bois writes, "One ever feels his two-ness, - an

American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled striv-

ings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone

keeps it from being torn asunder" (3). These two opposing perspectives exist on the same battlefield. The internalized White consciousness -

the consciousness of the White Master - assails, attacks, degrades, and

dehumanizes the Black subject. Nevertheless, Black consciousness re-

sists and will not be defined, determined, or defeated by Whiteness. At

this stage of his thinking, Du Bois believed in the project of the United

States; he believed that one day, a "brotherhood" between the two races

would emerge. Each race would strengthen and develop the other, and

in the process of mutual uplift, the "greater ideals of the American Re-

public" would be realized (8-9).14 The battlefield of double conscious-

ness, according to this logic, will one day dissolve.

Du Bois's theory of Black consciousness and his faith in the

American Republic are challenged by Peele's visual metaphor of the

sunken place. In Peele's experimental aesthetics, the horizontal meta-

phor of double consciousness becomes one of expansive verticality. Du

Bois's configuration of antagonistic consciousness on an equal, horizon-

tal plane becomes refigured into a vertical structure in which White

consciousness is at the top and Black consciousness is at the bottom;

and from the bottom, no battle seems possible, let alone winnable. In

contrast to Du Bois's concept-metaphor in which Black consciousness

can potentially combat White supremacy, in Peele's visual metaphor,

Whiteness wins. Whiteness remains solid, secure, and supreme. This

metaphor encapsulates Afro-pessimism. Chris becomes a silenced, in-

capacitated prisoner in his body. Or rather, he becomes conspicuously

legible as a slave. This reading is reinforced because the sunken place

resembles the hold of a slave ship, Chris is in a dark hole where his suf-

fering is unseen and unheard from the "actors" of modernity steering

the ship. As Christina Sharpe writes, modernity is marked and defined

by "the reappearances of the slave ship in everyday life in the form of

the prison, the camp, and the school" (21). To this list, we can add the

Black mind. If Du Bois's metaphor carried with it the implicit promise

of the Republic's ideals that all Americans will be incorporated into "the

kingdom of culture" (3), Peele's metaphor negates such optimism for the future.

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Peek's powerful metaphor-concept makes specific how Black

suffering and existence cannot be seen and heard by the White world.

To be a slave is to be stripped of one's humanity and, what is more,

one's ontology. The Middle Passage, Fanon writes, "wiped out" African

"metaphysics" ( Black Skin 110; qtd. in Wilderson 38) - which is to say,

Black slavery became the condition of a "new ontology," what Wilder-

son calls "chattel" ontology (18). Anyone can experience slavery, but for

Blacks, slavery has become an "ontology," a foundational paradigm. In

the modern world founded and developed by racialized slavery, "the Af-

rican body" is remade as "Black flesh," and that flesh is marked as sub-

ject to gratuitous, genocidal violence. (Wilderson, of course, is inspired

by Hortense Spillers's essential essay "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An

American Grammar Book.") Wilderson writes, "This violence which

turns a body into flesh, ripped apart literally and imaginatively, destroys

the possibility of ontology because it positions the Black in an infinite

and indeterminately horrifying and open vulnerability, an object made

available (which is to say fungible) for any [White] subject" (38).

In Scenes of Subjection : Terror > Slavery, and Self Making in

Nineteenth-Century America (1997), Saidiya Hartman writes that to

be a slave means experiencing "world-destroying capacities of pain, the

distortions of torture, the sheer unrepresentability of terror, and the

repression of the dominant accounts" (3). The foundational relation be-

tween Master and Slave, Hartman contends, is not labor, but rather,

terror. To be Black is to live in constant terror because being a Master,

being White, is a constant performance of dominance over the slave's

body and life. Hartman writes, such "demonstrations of power consist-

ed of forcing the enslaved to witness the beating, torture, and execution

of slaves, changing the names of slave children on a whim to emphasize

to slave parents that the owner, not the parents, determined the child's

fate, and requiring slaves to sing and dance for the owners ['] entertain-

ment and feign their contentment" (7-8). The Black body was a com-

modity that was abused for various sadistic purposes, including rape,

torture, dismemberment, and innumerable creative forms of cruelty.

And as Afro-pessimism foregrounds, Black terror and suffering are in-

communicable to the White world. Peek's sunken place visualizes how

the "grammar" of Black "suffering" is fundamentally unintelligible to the

White world (Wilderson 6).

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Can One Get Out? The Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism | 91

The sunken place powerfully symbolizes Afro-pessimism, a

political philosophy that rejects and negates the ideological foundation

of liberal society, including the belief in humanism. According to Af-

ro-pessimism, to be Black "is the very antithesis of a Human subject"

(Wilderson 9), As Wilderson writes, the precondition of being Human

is to be recognized as White. To be White/Human - means that vi-

olence is something conditional and peripheral to the Human experi-

ence, Violence, when and if it is encountered, is something unexpected

and experienced as something outside of the norm. Humans are on the

side of life, as evidenced by the volumes of White narratives that chart

(White) individuals developing and progressing. The cultural proof

of humanism is happy endings, where all social conflicts are resolved

and overcome. When such narratives conclude, (White) protagonists

are enriched - physically, emotionally, spiritually - by the experienced

conflicts. In contrast, Blacks are on the side of death, or rather, social

death. To be Black means that violence is foundational, the matrix of

existence. According to Afro-pessimism, Blacks will never be post-Black

as long as the period of Black Slavery persists. To believe that Blacks can

become Human through personal achievements, personal wealth, and

personal acts is an egregious form of false consciousness. For Blacks to

have faith in the system as it currently exists - from electoral politics to

civil society - is to capitulate to a structure of White Masters in which

Black bodies remain objects to be hyper-exploited, terrorized, and open

to gratuitous violence.

Only Whites are recognized as Humans because central to

the ontology of humanism is the belief that violence is contingent and

outside the normative human experience. To be White is a "structural

position in modernity [which] depends on the capacity to be free from

genocide" (Wilderson 49). This is not to say, as Wilderson makes clear,

that Whites cannot "experience" genocide. Wilderson is not, for ex-

ample, denying the Holocaust. But the difference between the Jewish

and African genocide is that the "Jews went into Auschwitz and came

out as Jews," In contrast, "Africans went into the ships and came out as

Blacks" (Wilderson 38), which, to use Fanons language, is to emerge as

a new "species." Blacks are created and projected outside of the Human;

therefore, "humanism" should be understood as a form of racism. From

the perspective of Afro-pessimism, Black lives have never mattered in

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modernity, and they do not matter in the dominant White world today.

No amount of protests or creative interventions can make Black lives matter.

Get Out , in many ways, is an Afro-pessimist film, a recognition

powerfully reinforced by the movie's "alternative ending." At the movie s

end, Chris escapes from the plantation and is hunted down by Rose,

the woman he thought was his girlfriend. Struggling for his life, Chris

gains the upper hand and ends up on top of Rose. It is at this moment

that Chris's body is coated by the red-and-blue lights of the police. In

the context of the contemporary, a Black man on top of a White woman

is interpreted in one dominant way: the pervasive threat of the Black

rapist. Again, reel history has aesthetically trained us how to read this

scene. Chris on top of Rose resembles the infamous scene from Birth

of a Nation - a movie that single-handedly led to the resurgence of the

KKK - in which the monstrosity of Blackness is symbolized by the

Black rapist. The reason the KKK are heroes is because of the ideologi-

cal positioning of Blacks as unchanging animals incapable of reason and,

therefore, outside of the Human. In Birth of a Nation, the KKK finishes

the job that White Masters were unable to complete during the previous

era of slavery. When the red-and-blue lights frame Chris's body, audi-

ences intuitively know how this will play out: he will either be killed or

be sent to jail. And in the alternative ending, Chris ends up incarcerated.

In Get Outs alternative ending, Chris moves from one man-

ifestation of the slave ship to another. As Sharpe writes, "the hold of

the slave ship" becomes the "prison ship." Sharpe continues, "The prison

repeats the logics, architectural and otherwise, of the slave ship (in and

across the global Black Diaspora)" (75). In the alternative ending, Chris

remains in a contemporary hold of the slave ship as his body is shuttled

from a modern-day plantation to the modern prison-industrial complex.

In both institutions, he remains excommunicated from the Kingdom

of the Human. The theatrical ending, in contrast, ends with a liberal

fantasy in which the police turn out not be antagonistic to Black life but,

instead, a solution and escape from slavery. In the film's theatrical re-

lease, the police officer ends up being Chris's best friend, Rod Williams

(Lil Rei Howery), a TS A officer who saves the day.

The alternative ending remains committed to Afro-pessimism

by its refusal to symbolically resolve or narratively break away from the

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Can One Get Out? The Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism | 93

"seven-hundred-year-long" history of "gratuitous violence which struc-

tures what is essential to 'Blackness [. ♦ .]' (Wilderson 142). Afro-pes-

simists warn against narrative fantasies that seek to escape the founda-

tional truth that capitalist/colonial modernity is predicated on Black

slavery. Wilderson critiques movies that use the police paradigm as a

symbolic path for Blacks to enter the kingdom of Humanity. According

to Wilderson, "Hollywood cinema" and "White political cinema" fun-

damentally misrepresent the "dynamic between Blackness and policing"

(118). The primary purpose of the police is to protect and ensure the

reproduction of "civil society" (a space of Whiteness) and conversely, to

ensure that Blacks remain "objects," incapable of occupying subject po-

sitions within civil society - which is to say, outside geographies of Hu-

manity. In 2010, Wilderson writes that the "35 million" Blacks in the

United States are "accumulated and fungible (owned and exchangeable)

objects living among 230 million subjects [. ♦ .]" (128).

A pervasive fantasy of White cinema, according to Wilder-

son, is the fantasy that "Blackness can embody the agency of policing"

(103). Wilderson makes this point while analyzing Antworte Fisher, in

which Denzel Washington plays a US Navy commander, "which is to

say, the police" (102). Wilderson highlights the widespread fantasy of

Blacks finding their "identity" through occupying "the agency of polic-

ing" by noting that prior to Antwone Fisher, Washington "played a po-

lice officer seven times." The symbolic fantasy of Blacks becoming the

police - rather than being objects of gratuitous violence - helps "sustain

the illusion that Blacks can indeed exist off screen as Human beings"

(Wilderson 103).

The alternative ending, I want to suggest, is the true ending -

the ending that stays with the philosophy of Afro-pessimism. But Get

Out does not fully commit to Afro-pessimism's absolutism. Rather, the

movie suggests a more powerful and realistic "way out" - one in which

aesthetics is central. At the Armitage plantation, Chris spies another

Black man present while looking through his camera lens. Chris im-

mediately lowers his camera - his protective shield - and heads toward

Andre, the young man at the movie's beginning, who is now a slave re-

branded "Logan King." "Good to see another brother here," Chris says

while intimately slapping Logan's shoulder from behind. This attempt

at racial intimacy and solidarity, so necessary in this threatening sea of

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Ryan Poll

Whiteness, is thwarted, though. When Logan turns around, his glassy

eyes and his mannered speech signify that something is off. Later in the

movie, as Chris's suspicions about the Armitage household amplify, he

attempts to sneak a picture of the young Black millennial, whose style,

speech, and demeanor suggest that his Blackness has been stolen. While

in a White-majority group, Chris subtly aims his cell phone and snaps

a picture of Logan. Inexplicably, the action stops and a trickle of blood

streams from Logan's nose. Then, in a gesture that can initially be read

as threatening, Logan lunges for Chris, grabs him by his arms, and yells

for Chris to "get out." Logan, though, is trying to help Chris; he is plead-

ing for Chris to escape.

I want to highlight how the cell phone becomes a means to tem-

porarily allow Andre to regain his consciousness and agency. It's not

the fancy, professional camera hanging around Chris's neck that actively

intervenes and allows Logan to momentarily recover his agency; it is,

instead, the cell phone that becomes a weapon against White suprem-

acy. Lenika Cruz astutely observes, "It was hard ... to watch that scene

without thinking of how important camera phones and video recordings

have been for many African Americans experiencing police violence -

especially in light of an earlier scene in which Chris is the apparent tar-

get of racial profiling by an officer." In contrast to professional cameras,

which are understood as artistic tools used to make recognizable and

commodifiable art for the marketplace, cell phones have become every-

day objects and, more importantly, political tools to capture state-sanc-

tioned violence against African American men, women, and children.

African Americans use cell phones to document evidence of racially motivated violence that the dominant White culture refuses to see and

recognize as systemic and pervasive. Not only can cell phones record

and frame the world that is unassimilable by White supremacists, but,

moreover, such activist images can spark an uprising. This was true in

Ferguson. And in Baltimore. And as Get Out suggests, everywhere. The

cultural producers at the center of these uprisings are not individual

"artists" but, rather, witnesses to racialized, state- sanctioned violence

who use their cell phones as necessary tools to represent and intervene in the White assault on Black bodies and the White assault on truth.

Black Lives Matter is a revolution galvanized by cell phones (Lowery

14-15; Ransby 1, 100-103; Stephen).

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Can One Get Out? The Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism | 95

In Mistaken Identity : Race and Class in the Age of Trump (2018),

Asad Haider warns against the potential danger of Afro-pessimism*

Haider argues that Afro-pessimism falls into an essentialist trap that

conceptually forecloses the possibility of collectivities forming that can

overthrow the dominant colonial-capitalist regime* As Haider writes,

a "fundamental symptom" of Afro-pessimism is that it "radicalizes and

ontologizes a separatist, black-exceptionalist perspective, rejecting even

the minimal gesture toward coalitions" (36)* Haider continues, "[sep-

aratist ideology," such as Afro-pessimism, "prevents the construction

of unity among the marginalized, the kind of unity that could actual-

ly overcome their marginalization" (37)* However, I want to stress that

Afro-pessimism - with its emphasis on how racialized slavery contin-

ues to structure the contemporary - educates and incentivizes African

Americans to form collectives of resistance. Another world is possible

and winnable; and in this battle for a new tomorrow, aesthetics will play

a central role, as it always does*15 It will come from intersectional work-

ing-class aesthetics, as Haider implies, and it will also come from radical Black aesthetics.

Fred Moten defines radical Black aesthetics as an "experimen-

tal" aesthetics that practices a "transgressive publicity" (255nl). In con-

trast to post-Blackness, Moten emphasizes that Black radical aesthetics

remains a political project inextricable from racialized slavery (16). Get

Out practices a radical Black aesthetics that visualizes the profound

truth of Afro-pessimism and, conversely, how African Americans are

not destined to remain slaves* Even if we accept the truth of Afro-pes-

simism that our inherited modernity "dehumans" Blacks and has made

Blacks into objects (Sharpe 74), Moten reminds us and emphasizes that

objects "resist" (1-24, 233-54).

Notes

1. 1 want to acknowledge the invaluable feedback from the terrific edi-

torial team of the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association,

especially Erika Behrisch Elee and the two anonymous reviewers whose

generous, insightful criticism made this final version infinitely stron-

ger. I also want to express my deepest gratitude to the English students

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Ryan Poll

at Northeastern Illinois University, who helped me develop this essay

every step of the way» In particular, I want to single out the following

students who listened to, commented upon, and read multiple drafts:

Mark Gunter, Kathryn Hudson, Katelyn Juerjens, and Jenn Lee» And

I'm blessed to be in the most supportive, encouraging, and intellectually

invigorating English department imaginable. I am greatly indebted to

all of my peers, but I want to especially mention the following who pro-

vided constructive criticism along the way: Vicki Byard, Olivia Cronk,

Amanda Goldblatt, Bradley Greenburg, Tim Libretti, Kristen Over,

and Timothy Scherman.

2. For more on how ignorance is a necessary condition of Whiteness, see Mills.

3. A complex intellectual genealogy of Afro-pessimism includes, but

is not limited to, Frantz Fanon, Lewis Gordon, Ronald Judy, David

Marriott, Achille Mbembe, Orlando Patterson, Hortense Spillers,

Christina Sharpe, Jared Sexton, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and George Yancy.

4. Wilderson insists on using the word "Black" in order to highlight the

ways in which Black subjects have been foundationally and ontological-

ly stripped of their humanity and, moreover, to foreground that Blacks

exist in a fundamental and irreconcilable antagonism with Whiteness.

5. The other six movies are Savannah , Freedom, The North Star, The

Keeping Room, Belle, and Tula (Samuels).

6. Thrasher writes that the movie "is a searing indictment of the on-go-

ing theft of the Black body, from the NBA draft to the beds of white

sex partners who don't treat their lovers as fully human." Some of the

mpvie's best criticism read Get Out as a movie about racialized slavery

and not simply about racism in the present. In conjunction with Thrash-

er, see both Cruz and Harris. As film scholar Brandon Harris insists,

Get Out is a "giant leap forward." His New Yorker essay begins, "The

African-American experience has often been, by any objective account,

a horrific one. So it might be surprising that, in the annals of Ameri-

can movies, Jordan Peek's 'Get Out' is likely the first auteurist horror

picture directed by an African-American man ever financed by a major

Hollywood studio." The movie's cultural significance is exemplified by

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Can One Get Out? The Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism | 97

Tananarive Due offering an entire course at UCLA centered on Peek's

movie - specifically his concept-metaphor of the "Sunken Place" (dis-

cussed later in this essay). Due reflects, "I love horror. . . . But it never dawned on me that I could have a black horror course before Get Out .

When a movie like that comes along, you now have a reference point to

talk about everything that has come before." She continues, "Horror

is a great way to address this awful, festering wound in the American

psyche, the slavery and genocide that [were] present during our nation's

birth. . . . We [as] a nation have not been able to process it in a healthy

way, or anything close to a healthy way." The name of the course is "The

Sunken Place" (qtd. in Hill).

7. Graeme Virtue writes, "By repositioning it [Gei Out] in the public

consciousness as a comedy - which is what will likely happen during the

endless mantra-like reporting of the Globes nominations and results -

we're in danger of short-changing Get Out's achievements and the tough

questions it raises. Are we trying to LOL ourselves into a false sense of

security?"

8. The haunting presence of Indigenous Americans in horror movies

somewhat challenges this narrative logic. As Coleman explores, while

African Americans are largely absent from 1980s suburban films, In-

digenous Americans are a pervasive trope. In White suburban movies,

Indigenous Americans become haunting spirits that forcefully insist

that these White settlements are not being constructed on "virgin"

land. The twist of many horror movies in the late 1970s and continu-

ing into the 1980s was that these White utopias were built atop Native

American burial grounds. This pattern repeats in Amityville Horror

(1979), The Shining (1980), and Poltergeist (1982) (Coleman 149).

Tellingly, there are few mainstream White movies in which African

American history haunts in a similar way. In a movie like Beloved,

which Coleman reads as a horror movie, the African American ghost

haunts the African American, not the White, community. One of the

few exceptions, which is also one of Coleman's favorite horror movies,

is Candyman (1992) (Coleman 216).

9. See especially the chapter "Vanilla Cities and Their Chocolate Sub-

urbs: On Resegregation" (64-85). Geographies, of course, are histori-

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Ryan Poll

cal and in the early twenty-first century, as Chang details, the racial ge-

ography of the United States transformed» As the chapter's title makes

explicit, White people gentrified the nations cities, forcing African

Americans to resettle in aging, dilapidating suburbs»

10» Alongside Golden and Ligon, "other important architects of this

moment include philosophers Kwame Anthony Appiah and Lewis

Gordon, artist Kara Walker, and writer Trey Ellis" (Taylor 18)»

11» For important critiques of post-Blackness, see Ali; see also Baker and Simmons»

12» It is worth stressing that post-Blackness remains haunted by an-

ti-Black racism» As Touré writes, "The post-Black era suggests to me

that what it means to be Black is broadening to infinity but it does not

mean that racism is over, that white supremacy is laying down its al-

most impenetrable shield» Racism remains a daily fact of life for Blacks

and a key component in shaping who we become as people even in the

post-Black era" (Touré 117)» In this sense, post-Blackness reads more

as a Utopian desire then a descriptive, evaluative periodizing category»

13» The secondary criticism on "double consciousness" is extensive

and wide-ranging» For an overview of Du Bois s importance to Afri-

can American theory and of the "epistemological dimension of double

consciousness," see Gordon 73-80» For an examination of Du Bois

in relation to other nineteenth-century theories of consciousness, see

Zamir 113-68» For a summary of how Du Bois s theory of double con-

sciousness remains central to the humanities and, conversely, has been

largely rejected by the social sciences, see Kirkland»

14» I am indebted to Kristen Over for this last point»

15» I want to thank Mark Gunter for helping me recognize that Af-

ro-pessimism galvanizes resistance»

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Can One Get Out? The Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism | 99

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