Can One Get Out The Aesthetics of Afro Pessimism

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
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Can One Get Out ? The Aesthetics of
Afro-Pessimism
Ryan Poll
see horror until it's too late, which
is another way of saying that for

.^¿1 a skit from Delirious White people, the experience of
(1983), Eddie Murphy suggests horror is unexpected and contin-
that the Hollywood horror mov- gent, not foundational to their
ie is a White genre,1 As Murphy identity and worldview.
humorously explains, a Black Murphy's joke discloses an
person who walked into a house important ideological truth about
where an apparition appeared or the racial politics of the horror
was even hinted at would imme- genre. In its dominant form, the
diately 'get out," By this logic, fea- genre works because White people
ture-length horror movies playing fundamentally imagine the world
at multiplexes (or streaming on without horror. Yes, such can hap-
digital devices) are only possi- pen, but it happens "over there,"
ble because of White ignorance.2 distant from the everyday ontolo-
Murphy's joke insightfully implies gy and experience of Whiteness.
that White people are incapable African Americans, in contrast,
of recognizing that horror can be are keenly aware that the world
enfolded into their everyday lives, is pervaded with horror and are
that horror can be constitutive of constantly vigilant for signifiers
the everyday. White people do not of such. Murphy's joke posits that
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
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
ARTS & ACTIVISM | FALL 2018 |VOLUME 51 | NUMBER 2
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.
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
ARTS & ACTIVISM | FALL 201 8 | VOLUME 51 | NUMBER 2
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
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-
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
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.
Ryan Poll
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-
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-
ARTS & ACTIVISM | FALL 2018 | VOLUME 51 | NUMBER 2
Ryan Poll
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
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-
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
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.
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
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).
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
"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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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).
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
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
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-
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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Midwest Modern Language Association

Can One "Get Out?" The Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism

see horror until it's too late, which

is another way of saying that for

African Americans have developed a sixth sense, one that immediately

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

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

ARTS & ACTIVISM | FALL 2018 |VOLUME 51 | NUMBER 2

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

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

looking at black people in hindsight as far as film goes

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

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

Geographies of Everyday Horror

ARTS & ACTIVISM | FALL 201 8 | VOLUME 51 | NUMBER 2

tury widely represented and perpetuated the ideology of suburbia as a

In the feature commentary that accompanies the digital HD,

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

ARTS & ACTIVISM | FALL 2018 |VOLUME 51 | NUMBER 2

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

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

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

ARTS & ACTIVISM | FALL 2018 |VOLUME 51 | NUMBER 2

This opening scene of an innocent Black millennial being

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

uninterrupted shot calls attention to itself and formally echoes other

Staying Woke in an Era of "Post-Blackness"

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

from the structural and institutional to the everyday and banal.

ARTS & ACTIVISM | FALL 2018 | VOLUME 51 | NUMBER 2

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

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

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

For generations, African Americans have been defined by the

My parents grew up in segregation with laws and

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

ARTS & ACTIVISM | FALL 2018 | VOLUME 51 | NUMBER 2

periodization is confirmed by all 105 African Americans interviewed

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

ARTS & ACTIVISM | FALL 2018 | VOLUME 51 | NUMBER 2

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

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

ARTS & ACTIVISM | FALL 2018 |VOLUME 51 | NUMBER 2

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

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

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

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

ARTS & ACTIVISM | FALL 2018 | VOLUME 51 | NUMBER 2

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

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

manization and disempowerment, then the resisting consciousness can

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

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

ARTS & ACTIVISM | FALL 2018 | VOLUME 51 | NUMBER 2

Peek's powerful metaphor-concept makes specific how Black

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

The sunken place powerfully symbolizes Afro-pessimism, a

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

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