New Review of Film and Television Studies

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Get Out and the legacy of sundown suburbs in

post-racial America

Elizabeth A. Patton

To cite this article: Elizabeth A. Patton (2019): Get�Out and the legacy of sundown
suburbs in post-racial America, New Review of Film and Television Studies, DOI:
10.1080/17400309.2019.1622889

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Published online: 02 Jun 2019.

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NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2019.1622889

Get Out and the legacy of sundown suburbs in

post-racial America
Elizabeth A. Patton
Media and Communication Studies, University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD, USA

ABSTRACT
In the thriller Get Out (2017), director Jordan Peele depicts the reality of people of
color in wealthy, white-dominated spaces in ‘post-racial’ America after the election
of Obama. In a post-racial society, colorblindness is represented in cinema by
increasing the number of black films, directors, writers, etc. This essay argues that
the logic of colorblind ideology masks the centrality of racism in neoliberalism. Get
Out challenges neoliberal racism in its current form of colorblindness through the
narrative and casting, but also uses memory to restore African-American history to
undermine other neoliberal strategies that obscure the colonial roots and the
lingering impact of structural racism, such as individualism, equality, and progres-
sivism. Get Out confronts the collective illusion of the elimination of racism as
a social-spatial practice in post-racial America, exemplified by the real horror of
Trayvon Martin being killed in the modern equivalent of a sundown town.

KEYWORDS Neoliberalism; horror; racism; memory; colorblindness; space

In Get Out (2017), Oscar-winning writer and director Jordan Peele mixes the
physical violence of the horror film, the mental anguish of the psychological
thriller and the biting humor of satire to depict the reality of people of color in
white-dominated spaces in ‘post-racial’ America. Although the film was released
a little over a month after Donald Trump’s inauguration, Peele wrote the script
to confront assertions that we live in a post-racial society that started to widely
circulate in public discourse during the Obama era (Zinoman 2017). The
inspiration behind Peele’s film is apparent as Get Out is a mixture of Guess
Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) and The Stepford Wives (1975) meets Night of
the Living Dead (1968). The plot focuses on a young black man named Chris
(Daniel Kaluuya) living in Brooklyn who agrees to meet his white girlfriend’s
parents for the first time at their secluded estate in the suburbs of NYC. Upon his
arrival, he finds himself surrounded by his girlfriend’s white parents and friends,
and the only black people in the community are the families live-in gardener,
housekeeper and a guest of the family that all seem brainwashed, unable to
display any autonomy or individual opinions.

CONTACT Elizabeth A. Patton [email protected]

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 E. A. PATTON

Although filmed in Alabama, Get Out is set in an upper middle-class

suburb in the ‘north’ with a liberal family. This decision illustrates the
continuity of old forms of racism and current neoliberal forms such as
colorblindness, which is facilitated by ideologies of meritocracy, equality,
and privatization that contribute to the myth that we live in a post-racial
society. As Christopher Mele argues, the foundation of colorblind racial
discourse is a ‘(mis)reading of the outcome and significance of the civil
rights era, in which the successes of subsequent court orders and legislation
that eliminated de jure discrimination in the workplace and in housing far
outweigh the continued realities of racial discrimination and their effects’
(Mele 2013, 601). Thus, the ideology of colorblindness is based on the belief
in equal opportunity and that everyone in the United States is now treated
equally even though colorblind racism keeps the historical causes of racial
disparity hidden and also obscures how racism persists in the United States.
I want to build on scholars such as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s argument that
colorblindness masks the centrality of racism in neoliberalism. It is an
aspect of a ‘racist society that works to both reinforce the racial structure
of society, while also modifying the processes of racialization’ (Roberts and
Mahtani 2010, 250). Get Out illustrates how neoliberal forms of racism
exists as spatial practices and what Joshua Inwood (2015) describes as new
ways to speak of race without referencing overt forms of white supremacy.
In this essay, I argue that Peele’s Get Out uses a politicized form of memory
to undermine neoliberal racism by connecting newer practices of racism to
older forms of racism that have been historically erased.
In the film and television industries, colorblind ideology is masked as racial
progressivism, especially in the form of increased racial and ethnic diversity on
screen. For example, media scholar Kristen Warner (2015) connects neoliberal
ideology to the practice of blindcasting or colorblind casting in television, i.e.,
the practice of hiring actors without regard to race or ethnicity. She contends
that blindcasting supports the ‘illusion that under liberal individualism, the
marketplace will do right by historically marginalized individuals’ (645).
Although the practice is well intentioned and appears to increase racial diver-
sity, Warner argues that increased representation on television alone does not
provide culturally diverse representations of people of color and consequently,
does not challenge white hegemony.
The White Savior film is another example that reflects colorblind logic in
a post-racial society (Ash 2015, 86). The white savior is a messianic figure
that physically saves or morally redeems people of color and operates
within spaces that juxtapose the protagonist with racists or bigots and
minority norms and culture (Hughey 2014). The white savior narrative
alleviates white guilt by attempting to remedy historical oppression and
elides the ‘structural circumstances that influence and invite inequality’
(Ash 2015, 97). Although there are earlier examples, such as To Kill
 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 3

a Mockingbird (1962, Robert Mulligan), the proliferation of this narrative

form began in the Reagan Era in response to the culture wars and the
adoption of neoliberalism to address economic and racial inequality
(Hughey 2014). A few examples of successful Hollywood films include
Freedom Writers (2007), The Blind Side (2009), The Help (2011) and The
Great Wall (2016).
In general, horror films since the 1990s have also adopted colorblind
casting, constructing a diverse, ‘one of each,’ cast of victims to confront the
common tropes of the genre: monstrosities, disruption and fear (Coleman
2011, 7, 213). Mainstream horror films by non-black directors or writers may
inadvertently deal with race or confront race directly by including black actors
that are crucial to the narrative but are often depicted in stereotypical roles. In
contrast, horror films by black creators are often overtly ‘race’ films or what
film theorist Robin Means Coleman calls ‘black horror’ (2011, 7). For example,
she argues that Beloved (1998) confronts the negation of the historical legacy of
slavery in a post-racial society by ‘put[ting] the brakes on such delusions,
forcing horror audiences to see if they could stand real atrocities while restor-
ing Black history’ (2011, 186). Peele’s debut horror film follows this tradition.

Racialized spaces
Get Out opens with a prelude: a young black man, who we later learn is
missing Brooklyn resident Andre, walking down an affluent suburban
street at night. In the very beginning, Peele uses a horror film trope, an
individual walking alone in an unfamiliar dark space, to comment on
white fears and white supremacy. To recognize this scene we must
acknowledge that the suburbs have become a ‘spatial metaphor for
whiteness itself’ (Wiese 2004, 109). Historically, television and film have
represented the suburbs as an idealized place of the white middle class
even though the suburbs have become increasingly diverse both econom-
ically and racially in the last 30 years (Corbin 2015, 170). As Robin
Means Coleman argues, the suburban spaces of ‘Main and Elm streets . .
. were not accessible to just any old member of the public. Implicitly, no
Blacks (or any racial minorities for that matter) were allowed’ (2011,
147). By the 1980s, popular horror films such as Amityville Horror
(1979), Halloween II (1981) and Poltergeist (1982), which were set in
the suburbs, did not depict African-Americans characters (Coleman
2011). Instead, in the era of the culture wars, African Americans were
associated with violence and decay in the spaces of the city.
Andre talking to his girlfriend on the phone expresses concern that
to visit her he has to travel through a ‘creepy confusing-ass suburb.’ In
the scene, the suburbs are synonymous with whiteness when Andre
uses a comedic white voice to pronounce the word ‘suburbs.’ He also
4 E. A. PATTON

calls attention to his blackness by stating, ‘I feel like a sore thumb out
here.’ A white vintage sports car comes into view, passes by but shortly
turns around and starts to follow Andre. The audience hears the car
stereo playing old-time music and the lyrics of Run Rabbit Run (1939),
a World War II song that eerily transports us to the period of Jim
Crow and foreshadows the necessity for the protagonist to run and get
out of there. Peele recognizes that the suburbs are represented as
‘rigidly controlled place[s], protected by modes of surveillance and
discipline’ (Beuka 2004, 220–221). This is a metaphor for a sundown
suburb as Peele flips a common racist narrative: the presence of a black
male in the suburbs as a threat who becomes the victim of violence.
Peele’s film is an example of the ‘expressive artifacts’ that African
Americans have created to chronicle ‘history with memories’ that supple-
ment the erasure of racism in official historical narratives that homogenize
‘the diverse cultural forces resident in the landscape, and thus reinforcing
a peculiar sense of collective amnesia’ (Barton 2001, xv-xvi). In this case, the
whiteness of American suburbs did not happen by accident. As sociologists
James Loewen claims, ‘[o]n the contrary, all-white suburbs were achieved’
(2005, 109). Andre recognizes the danger and begins to talk to himself,
voicing the inner dialogue many people of color experience in similar life-
threatening situations. As the car backs up to follow him, we hear Andre say
aloud: ‘Okay, I just keep on walking and don’t do anything stupid. [Sighs]
Fuck this, I’m going the other way. Not today . . . not me! You know how they
like to do motherfuckers out here. I’m gone.’ Andre’s supposed suspicion is
confirmed. He is choked by a mysterious white man until he passes out and is
kidnapped by the man in the white car. This scene references the practice of
controlling the movement of black men in public spaces, the use of the police
to criminalize blackness in white spaces, and the threat of death to people of
color that the Black Lives Matter movement has brought to the national
spotlight. Yet, the dialogue also points to the colonial historical roots of this
violent racial practice in sundown towns and the general violence acted on
African Americans during Jim Crow. The film associates ‘whiteness with the
bringing of death’ to people of color (Dyer 1997, 209). Andre’s words echo
similar experiences of people of color that dared to walk in towns and
suburban spaces designated as white only. From the onset, Peele connects
the colonial roots of what Richard Dyer describes as ‘whiteness as death’ with
racist practices of spatial exclusion in the suburbs.
The opening scene of Get Out also demonstrates how media representations
contribute to racialized understandings of space. Chris is an accomplished
photographer. The camera zooms in on black and white photographs of urban
life that are placed on the walls of Chris’s loft apartment in Brooklyn. As
viewers, we recognize the dichotomy: urban places are often depicted as spaces
of blackness, in opposition to the previous scene in the suburbs, which
 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 5

represented a space of whiteness. Since the 1970s, Hollywood has bolstered this
racial dichotomy of space. For the most part, Hollywood films that feature
predominantly black casts are situated in urban environments. As Robert
Beuka notes, ‘blaxploitation’ films of the 1970s and the wave of violent ‘gangsta’
films in the late 1980s and 1990s ‘contributed to continuing racial and envir-
onmental stereotypes through its thoroughgoing association of African
Americans (and particularly young black men) with a hyperviolent urban
world of crime and drugs’ (2004, 193). African Americans were visually
associated with urban decay representing all that was wrong with the city:
poverty, crime, and broken families. These representations reflected prevailing
public narratives of violent black men and ‘Welfare Queens’ that captured the
attention of the New Right during the 1980s.
In the film’s title sequence, Peele directly addresses the audience through
music to transport viewers from the suburbs to the city by traveling through
a rural space. In the in-between space of the woods, Peele addresses the African
American audience by asking them to remember the past. As we travel along,
we hear music playing with lyrics from the song ‘Sikiliza kwa wahenga’ (2017)
by Michael Abels, which is Swahili for ‘listen to your ancestors.’ Next, we hear
‘Redbone’ (2016) by Donald Glover (also known as the Childish Gambino)
asking the audience to ‘stay woke!’ because ‘They gon’ find you, Gon’ catch you
sleepin’, put your hands up baby . . . Now, don’t you close your eyes.’ To be
woke is to be aware, to look past the given narrative, to question instruments of
white supremacy. In an interview with journalist Trent Clark, Peele expressed
the importance of connecting with black audiences. ‘Well, first of all, I love the
“Stay Woke” [lyric] – that’s what this movie is about.’ He adds, ‘I wanted to
make sure that this movie satisfied the black horror movie audience’s need for
characters to be smart and do things that intelligent and observant people
would do’ (Clark 2017). People of color are not afraid of non-urban places and
do not only feel at home in the city; however, when traveling in spaces of
whiteness they must stay alert to potential threats as people of color historically
and still encounter people that actively seek to make such spaces a horrifying
experience. Chris expresses such concern when he learns that his girlfriend
Rose (Allison Williams) did not tell her parents that he is black, reminding the
audience of the history of racism towards African Americans if they showed up
in white spaces unannounced. Peele reminds us of a history of African
Americans seeking to live and travel through such racially charged spaces
needed to depend on memory, word-of-mouth, and guides such as the
Green Book to avoid physical and/or psychological harm.1
In Get Out, violence happens at night, paralleling the temporal and spatial
separation practiced by sundown towns during Jim Crow. Sundown towns
started to appear between 1890 and 1940, which corresponds to the period
after the Civil War and Reconstruction eras in American history (Loewen
2005, 6). Sundown town and suburbs2 obtained their name because of the
6 E. A. PATTON

signs that were posted at the main roadways that led to the entrance of such
places. These signs were posted by town officials and sometimes by residents who
were enabled by town ordinances (Loewen 2005, 3). These signs usually said
some variation of the following: ‘Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on You in
___.’ In these racially segregated places people of color, especially African-
Americans, Mexicans and sometimes Jews were not allowed to be within the
town limits after sunset. Racism was organized as a social-spatial system primar-
ily through practices of exclusion, duplication, and temporal separation
(Weyeneth 2015). Sundown towns and suburbs located across the country
represented one such strategy to spatially segregate minorities from white popu-
lations. In these places, people of color were not allowed to be within the town
limits after sunset even though they often worked or shopped in these spaces
during the day. Preventing minorities from spending the night in town meant
that physically and symbolically such spaces remained white, as people of color
were restricted from residing in these spaces. White residents used intimidation,
violence and discriminatory laws to enforce these restrictions.
The enforcement of sundown towns by white residents and the violent
removal of black residents in towns and pre-postwar suburbs throughout the
country during the Jim Crow era kept majority white suburbs white during the
postwar period. During the postwar period some African Americans were able
to move into the middle class but were unable to purchase homes in the
suburbs. Black ownership in the suburbs was discouraged and supported by
restrictive covenants and unconcealed violence (Kelly 1993; Loewen 2005).
Moreover, most African Americans were unable to participate in the postwar
suburban boom because of widespread racist lending practices, such as red-
lining and discriminatory real estate practices of steering black homebuyers
away from white neighborhoods, as well as community covenants that pre-
vented white owners from selling houses to black homebuyers. Historians
Jonathan and Donna Fricker note that the number of African Americans living
in the suburbs increased by one million by the 1950s (2010, 7). Still African
Americans made up only 5 percent of the suburban population by 1960. The
reality of limited opportunities did not prevent African-American consumer
magazines from representing the American dream for blacks even though
mainstream popular culture did not include such depictions. In one example,
a successful Harlem businessman explained to Ebony magazine his primary
reason for moving his family to a white affluent New York City suburb. ‘We felt
we should be able to live anywhere as Americans. I’m just a fellow who works
hard every day for what he has. A white guy earning what I earn would have
much greater options as to where to live’ (Douglas 1973). Ebony magazine
depicted African-American celebrities and professionals as exemplifying mid-
dle and upper-middle class lifestyles in the suburbs by embracing domestic
consumerism and escaping crime in the city.3 Therefore, for people of color,
 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 7

the suburbs came to represent a contradictory space of potential violence and

missed socioeconomic opportunity.
In order to recognize that ‘whiteness in the black imagination is often
a representation of terror,’ bell hooks proposes ‘that one must face a palimpsest
of written histories that erase and deny, that reinvent the past to make the present
vision of racial harmony and pluralism more plausible’: (1992, 342) hooks
appeals to memory to understand how neoliberal racism erases history, in this
case the framing of suburban whiteness as a natural phenomenon – a result of
individual economic decisions instead of the deliberate result of violence and
policies since the Jim Crow era. Furthermore, representations of the suburban
landscape also reflect ‘historically specific social and cultural concerns’ (Beuka
2004, 19). Specifically, race ‘as a social construct and concept . . . has had
a profound influence on the spatial development of the American landscape,
creating separate, though sometimes parallel, overlapping or even superimposed
cultural landscapes for black and white Americans’ (Barton 2001, xv). Therefore,
I approach the suburban landscape as racially constructed and draw on bell
hook’s appeal to memory as a form of resistance to recover the historical
narratives and memories of violence in such spaces and argue that Get Out
represents such an aggregation.
Historically, Hollywood films depicted sundown towns in the south. In
The Fugitive Kind (1960), Sheriff Talbott threatens to kill drifter Valentine
Xavier (Marlon Brando) if he does not leave the town. Talbott uses the
following language to conjure the image of a sundown town:

I’m gonna tell you something. There’s a certain county I know of that’s got a big
sign that says: “Nigger, don’t let the sun go down on you in this county.” And
that’s all it says. It don’t threaten nothing. It just says, “Nigger, don’t let the sun
go down on you in this county.” Well, son, you ain’t that nigger. This ain’t that
county. But I want you to just imagine that you seen a big sign that said to you:
Boy, don’t let the sun rise on you in this county.

Other examples include the made for television films Sudie and Simpson
(1990), based on Sarah Flanigan Carter’s autobiographical novel, which is
set in a fictional Georgia town with a sign that reads ‘Nigger!! Don’t let the
sun set on you in Linlow,’ and Freedom Song (2000) starring Danny Glover
set in a Mississippi town with a large sign saying, ‘Nigger, Read and Run/If
you can’t read, run anyway.’
Peele’s decision to locate the story in a northeastern suburb is significant as
urban spaces and the South are traditionally associated with violence for people
of color. Peele confirms this in an interview, stating that ‘[i]t was really
important for me to not have the villains in this film reflect the typical red
state type who is usually categorized as being racist. It felt like that was too
easy,’ he said. ‘I wanted this film to explore the false sense of security one can
have with the, sort of, New York liberal type’ (Butler 2017). Racial injustice
8 E. A. PATTON

exists in so-called liberal spaces because neoliberalism is ‘sutured to geogra-

phies of race and racism in ways that reproduce inequality’ (Inwood 2015,
410). Peele’s Get Out challenges neoliberal racism by undermining the strategy
of colorblindness, which obscures the colonial roots of violence towards people
of color and the lingering impact of structural racism.

The sunken place, or living while black

Chris experiences overt forms of racism and micro-aggressions during his visit
with the family. On the way to her parent’s house, Rose and Chris hit a deer and
pull off to the side of the road to recover from the shock. A police offer stops to
see if they are okay, but the interaction escalates when the officer asks to see
Chris’s driver’s license even though he was not driving. Chris, in an act of
survival, attempts to comply with the officer’s request, but Rose pushes back
and tells the officer he has no right to ask Chris for ID. This scene demonstrates
Amy Corbin’s observation that ‘socially liberal and moderate whites . . . feel more
enlightened than those who [are] overt racists or thought race no longer
mattered’ (2015, 19). Clearly, Rose is permitted to act out and be ‘disrespectful’
and somewhat sarcastic to the officer without being arrested or killed. Rose is
outraged by overt racism but later we find out she is still complicit in the ideology
of white supremacy. This scene assures that the audience is comfortable as white
viewers see a liberal version of themselves in her character and therefore are not
implicated in practices that keep racism in place.
In the beginning of the film, we see Rose’s character as a ‘woke’ white liberal.
Her parents are also upper middle-class liberals who ‘would have voted for
Obama a third time.’ In spite of their liberal political leanings, Chris still
experiences micro-aggressions by Rose’s father, Dean Armitage, and friends
of their family. For example, Dean uses a black voice and slang when conver-
sing with Chris. The next day the Armitages host a party where neighbors
continually refer to Chris’s blackness, commenting on everything from his
virility to athletic ability. One neighbor tries to strike up a conversation with
Chris about Tiger Woods, while another states that ‘Black is now in fashion.’
Chris realizes that something is off, but continues to rationalize staying to
support Rose and their developing relationship. This form of racism seems
unintentional and most of the statements are framed as positive – the types of
micro-aggressions experienced by marginalized groups under the ideology of
colorblindness. In an interview for the New York Times, Peele explains why he
explores this dynamic in the film. ‘As a black man, sometimes you can’t tell if
what you’re seeing has underlying bigotry, or it’s a normal conversation and
you’re being paranoid. That dynamic in itself is unsettling. I admit sometimes
I see race and racism when it’s not there. It’s very disorienting to be aware of
certain dynamics’ (Zinoman 2017). Peele’s statement along with Chris’s
 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 9

experience in the film reveals how colorblind ideology delegitimizes black

experience and erases black subjectivity.
At the same party, an Asian guest asks Chris if he thinks African
Americans have more advantage or disadvantage in the modern world. It
is not by chance that Peele uses an Asian character to embody this senti-
ment because in neoliberal racism, individualism, equity and meritocracy
mask racial inequality. In our current form of white supremacy, Asian
Americans are cast as the model minority, pitting people of color against
each other to maintain existing racial hierarchies. In Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s
words:
Color blind racism articulates elements from the free market ideology and
culturally based arguments to justify the contemporary racial order. . . . By
supporting equality, fairness, and meritocracy as abstract principles but
denying the existence of systematic discrimination and disregarding the
enormous and multifarious implications of the massive existing racial
inequality . . . whites can appear ‘non racist.’ They can criticize safely any
institutional approach to ameliorate racial inequality. And they can blame
minorities for their situation. (2001, 80)

Adopting the ideology of colorblind racism means that African Americans

and other people of color are solely responsible for their social conditions.
If people of color are still poor in the early 21st century, it is not because of
structural forces and the history of racism; it is their own fault.
Get Out interlinks references to old forms of racism with current neoliberal
forms. The film depicts palimpsest spaces that contain an aggregation of
historical narratives and memories of mental and physical violence experi-
enced by people of color underneath the layer of our contemporary moment of
Black Lives Matter. Notably, Rose’s father (Bradley Whitford) is a doctor and
her mother (Catherine Keener) is a psychologist, metaphors for the bodily and
psychological violence historically committed against people of color. In con-
trast to the micro-aggressions experienced by Chris that I describe above,
Rose’s brother Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones) openly discusses stereotypes
about black bodies, using terminology such as ‘genetic make-up’ and telling
Chris that he ‘would be a fucking beast’ if he trained his body. These statements
represent racial essentialism and violence, i.e., old forms of racism rooted in
colonialism and slavery. Jeremy causes tension at the dinner table as he permits
old ideological forms of racism to slip into consciousness alongside neoliberal
sensibilities about race. He is your cousin or uncle that voted for Trump that
disrupts the neoliberal façade of post-racism.
At the party, Chris is visibly relieved that he is not the only black person
at the party when he spots Andre across the backyard. Chris is quickly
disappointed when Andre introduces himself as Logan, an Uncle Tom-like
character dressed in clothes and a hat reminiscent of a minstrel act. Unlike
the audience, Chris does not recognize Andre as the young man that was
10 E. A. PATTON

kidnapped in the beginning of the film. Like the main character in The
Stepford Wives who experiences isolation in the suburbs, Chris is a city
dweller transported to unfamiliar surroundings; however, Peele goes further
and alludes to the familiarity of isolation and fear that African Americans
experienced traveling through or living in these spaces of whiteness. If
African Americans moved to all-white suburbs during the postwar period
they were often the only black family in the neighborhood, or else they were
live-in domestic servants. For example, in 1962, Mrs. Jacqueline Robbins,
a young black housewife, moved to a then all-white suburb of Chicago,
Illinois. Mrs. Robbins, her chemist husband Terry, and their two children
moved into a suburb whose first and only black family had just recently
moved out. As she described the experience, ‘Being a Negro in the middle
of white people is like being alone in the middle of a crowd’ (Starr 1967). In
the film, Chris echoes this feeling when he tells Georgina, the Armitage’s
black housekeeper, ‘All I know is that sometimes if there are too many
white people I get nervous.’
After Chris takes a picture of Andre to share with his friend Ron, the
flash stuns Andre causing him to yell at Chris to ‘Get Out!’ Peele’s clever
use of the phrase ‘get out’ is a call for audiences to recognize the masked
threat of violence for marginalized people when moving through such
spaces in the past and the present. It also evokes the use of signs posted
outside of sundown towns throughout the country during Jim Crow,
revealing the legacy of racism as a social-spatial practice. Although there
were no official Jim Crow laws north of the Mason-Dixon Line, people of
color that lived and traveled in the suburban and rural spaces of the north
also had to navigate the socio-spatial practices of racism. As historian
Thomas Sugrue argues, negotiating ‘northern Jim Crow was exhausting,
demoralizing, and dangerous’ for black people (2009, 132). For example,
Langston Hughes writing for the Chicago Defender discussed his experience
traveling across the country: ‘As for sleeping, I guess Negro travelers are not
expected to sleep. Hotels and tourists camps almost uniformly refuse
colored guests. Mind you, I am not asking to sleep with any white man’s
daughter. I merely want to SLEEP – and be on my way’ (Santis 1995, 104).
Perhaps the implicit intent of sundown towns was the prevention of
intimacy between black and white people through physical separation at
night. Ironically, Chris is in fact sleeping with a white woman, realizing the
fear of white segregationists all along and even for many white Americans
that do not support overt forms of racism. Peele’s representation of a black
and white heteronormative relationship as still potentially dangerous in
a post-Civil Rights era exposes the collective myth that we live in a post-
racial society buoyed by discourses of colorblindness in statements such as
‘love is blind – it sees no color.’ Chris and Rose’s relationship signifies
a browning of the U.S. – a contamination of whiteness – and consequently
 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 11

a loss of socioeconomic power for people who want to maintain the

political and economic value of whiteness.
Dean secretly auctions Chris to the party guests using Bingo cards while
Chris leaves the party to discuss going back to the city with his girlfriend.
The silent auction is both a reference to slavery and the collective amnesia
of neoliberal racism. Present-day racism appropriates black bodies and
culture and advances post-racial narratives that claim that racism no longer
exists. Chris’s friend Rod is the only person who does not seem to suffer
from amnesia and recognizes that he is in danger. Rod, who represents the
collective experience and memories of African Americans, still possesses
agency, which was taken away from Chris after he was hypnotized by Missy
Armitage (Rose’s mother) the night before to help him quit smoking. To
keep Chris from escaping their home, Missy sends him to the sunken place.
This place is the key to understanding the political message of the film.
Peele uses the collective fear of the unknown, typical of horror films, by
depicting the sunken place as a space of darkness – a black hole (Figure 1).
In the sunken place, Chris finds himself tied to a chair in the basement and
forced to watch a video on a 1960s TV console by Rose’s grandfather Roman
Armitage. The video titled ‘Behold the Coagula’ explains that Chris was
chosen for his ‘natural gifts.’ Rose’s father and grandfather are a metaphor
for the generational bridge between Jim Crow forms of racism and color-
blindness. According to Dean (Rose’s father), Roman Armitage participated
in the 1936 Olympics but lost to Jesse Owens. Thus, he represents the era of
overt spatial segregation and violence compared to Dean, a Baby Boomer,
who presumably embraces progressive racial politics and practices. The film
reaches further back into history as the Armitages live with black servants in
a large, lakeside upper-middle class home that is architecturally reminiscent
of an antebellum plantation. The house features a centered entrance, wide
covered porch, evenly-spaced windows, and Greek-type columns typical of

Figure 1. Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) trapped in the sunken place in Get Out (Jordan Peele,
2017).
12 E. A. PATTON

Figure 2. Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) picks cotton from the chair to plug his ears in Get Out
(Jordan Peele, 2017).

the antebellum style of architecture that was popular in the South in the first
half of the 19th century. Peele pushes the slavery metaphor further as Chris
avoids passing out from the hypnotic trigger and escapes captivity by picking
cotton from the chair to plug his ears (Figure 2).
The sunken place acts as a space of containment where Chris is forced to view
his life through a screen. Chris is told by the gallery owner that will inhabit his
body that he will live a ‘limited existence’ and ‘live in the sunken place.’ The black
mind and voice are silenced. In response to questions about the meaning of the
sunken place, Peele answered by stating that ‘we’re marginalized. No matter how
hard we scream, the system silences us’ (Peele 2017). Chris hesitantly consents to
hypnosis and consequently enters the sunken place because of his perceived
failures – his inability to stop smoking and that he did not try to save his mom
from dying during his childhood. Bonilla-Silva explains that as white suprema-
cist tactics such as intimidation and force ‘became costly, unstable, and ineffec-
tive, the form of racial domination [colorblind racism] grew hegemonic’ (2001,
76). For example, people of color in the US are often told by politicians, pundits,
and the media to focus on perceived failures such as broken families, poverty and
minority crime instead of structural racism as the reason they are unable to
succeed and achieve the American Dream. Consequently, power is maintained
by the dominant racial group through consent by oppressed groups that accept
their norms, values and practices as natural, ‘the normal framework of reference’
(Bonilla-Silva 2001, 76).
After killing the Armitage family to escape, we see Chris leaning over Rose’s
dying body dressed in white, doubling the ‘representation of whiteness as
terrorizing’ (Hooks 1992, 341). As in many psychological thrillers and horror
films, the police finally arrive. For white audiences the police represent salvation,
but for people of color a looming threat. In sundown towns and public spaces of
whiteness during Jim Crow, the police were often deployed to prevent African
Americans from occupying such spaces (Wiese 2004, 46). In extreme cases, such
 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 13

confrontations could lead to death. For example, in 1946 in Freeport, Long

Island, four brothers argued with a white restaurant owner who would not serve
them coffee. An officer arrested the ‘misbehaving Negroes,’ lined the brothers up
against a wall, physically assaulted them, and shot two of them to death (Sugrue
2009, 149). Peele has acknowledged in public interviews that he was influenced
by the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 and by contemporary instances of
violence on black teenagers and men by the police. Therefore, in the final scene,
we expect the worst for Chris (death). In the unreleased version Chris is arrested
for killing the Armitage family. However, before releasing the final version of the
film, Peele decided to change the ending and consequently overturns the
common horror trope when his friend Ron, a black man, arrives in his police
car and takes him home. Peele explains his reasoning for the new ending: ‘It was
very clear that the ending needed to transform into something that gives us
a hero, that gives us an escape, gives us a positive feeling when we leave this
movie. There’s nothing more satisfying than seeing the audience go crazy when
Rod shows up.’ Chris is not arrested and does not suffer reprisal for defending
himself against a violent white family.

Conclusion
Peele’s film resists neoliberal racism by compelling audiences to both
recognize historical forms of racism and experience contemporary forms
of racism that are the foundation of real terror people of color continue to
face every day in predominant spaces of whiteness. This is accomplished by
using common horror tropes such as the fetishization of black bodies, being
out of place and fear of the unknown. Ultimately, Chris and Andre repre-
sent bodies to be feared in racist white culture (imagined monsters) and this
belief is reinforced when subjected to racial essentialism in the form of
stereotypes (from supposed virility to athletic ability) by Rose’s family and
guests. Andre and Chris feel out of place, outsiders in the controlled and
unnatural suburban environment, allowing audiences to feel the fear gen-
erated by the loss of power and privilege. As audience members, we fear the
unknown along with the protagonist as violence lurks under the source but
is largely hidden.
Get Out confronts the collective illusion of the elimination of racism as
a social-spatial practice in a supposedly post-racial America, exemplified by
the real horror of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old black male, killed in
a gated community – the modern equivalent of a sundown suburb.
Martin was on his way home after purchasing candy and ice tea at
a nearby convenience store when George Zimmerman, a neighborhood
watch member, called 911 to report ‘a suspicious person’ and later con-
fronted and shot Martin to death. The acquittal of Zimmerman led to the
beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement. In response to the acquittal
14 E. A. PATTON

of Zimmerman, community activists Patrice Cullors, Opal Tometi, and

Alicia Garza created the Twittter hashtag #BlackLivesMatter in 2013,
which led to the beginning of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.
Get Out, like the Black Lives Matter movement, recognizes that the only
way to confront racism is to reject neoliberal colorblindness that ignores
systemic racism and the historical means in which spaces of whiteness are
weaponized to maintain relationships of power.

Notes
1. The Negro Motorist Green Book was an annual guidebook used by African
Americans during the Jim Crow era to navigate segregation while traveling
throughout the United States. The book was published by Victor Hugo
Green, a New York City mail courier, from 1936 to 1966.
2. Sometimes they are referred to as sunset towns.
3. See for example, ‘Will the suburbs beckon?’. Ebony, July 1971.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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