What's Really Scary About Get Out

The horror hit’s family of ‘chipper Kellyanne Conways whitesplaining away racism’ reveals the modern face of bigotry, writes the THR columnist, who recalls his own past as the ‘Good Negro’.

- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

I recently watched the highly entertaining thriller Get Out and the deeply disturbing documentary I Am Not Your Negro. Turns out they’re the same movie. Both films deal with the subjugation of the unpopular voice through the enslavement of the body. Get Out uses a medical-horror genre, and I Am Not Your Negro uses James Baldwin’s passionate outrage at the martyrdom of his friends Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Both explore the differences between the end of legal slavery and the lingering effects of institutional slavery. And the urgent message in both is that unless the body is free from others controlling its actions and free from constant threat of injury or death, that body, that person, that people are still enslaved.

Get Out’s well-deserved 99 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating has as much to do with its sly subversive message as its spooky ride. Created by the talented Jordan Peele, the film expresses the African-American experience with structural racism in a way that blacks hope whites will better understand after seeing it. Most important is the idea that the constant physical threat of violence — whether from police, the legal system or racist groups — is in and of itself a way to control people. Ta-Nehisi Coates describes this daily dilemma: