Black Bodies/White Spaces: The Horrors of White Supremacy in Get Out (2017)

Abstract

Since Get Out came out in May 2017, it has been widely received as “political horror” for its strong commentary on race relations in the United States. The starting point for Peele’s exploration of race in the United States was the way the racialized structures of social environments produced and organized unequal race relations. This structural perspective on race allows Get Out to raise political questions that deeply resonated with the dominant concerns of the movement for racial justice at the time of its release. But the film is also political in the way that it uses its status as a cultural object to question and reshape the racialization of US cultural space. In this chapter, I focus on three aspects of the racial politics of Get Out: how the film exposes the past and present objectification and exploitation of Black bodies, how it ties such exploitation to the racialized power dynamics of social spaces in US society, and, finally, how Get Out seeks to rewrite the racial coordinates of US cultural history by reclaiming historically predominantly white cultural spaces—such as the horror genre—for Black narratives.