Notes from the Abyss

MECHANICSVILLE, Va. (July 25, 2021) — I remember the Oscar buzz about Get Out[1]—and was impressed that a screenplay for a “horror” film actually broke through the usual Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences snobbery and won. While I would not be surprised if Academy members failed to take all the lessons buried in screenwriter/director Jordan Peele’s vision to heart, there is more than enough substance in that “genre” film to keep it relevant for decades—either as a reminder of what was, or a warning of what could (again) be.

The plot of Get Out features a Black man named Chris Washington (portrayed by Daniel Kaluuya) going on a trip to visit the parents of his white girlfriend Rose Armitage (Allison Williams). The parents, Dean Armitage (Bradley Whitford) and Missy Armitage (Catherine Keener) come off initially as somewhat clueless, well-off white liberals. They welcome Chris with open arms, but his unease with the situation ultimately proves well founded—though not for the reasons he originally envisioned.

—

Before submerging into the film, I would like to share a little personal background. A few years ago, I found out I had been legally black in my home state of Louisiana until 1983. I don’t look it—in fact, my Asian ancestry is more evident in my face and skin color. Nevertheless, under Louisiana laws that weren’t repealed until 1983, I was black. For much of its slave-owning history, Louisiana had a more nuanced conception of race than most other slave-owning states. Louisiana for centuries recognized mulattoes (one-half Black), quadroons (one-quarter Black), octaroons (one-eighth black), mustefinos (my personal fraction; one-sixteenth Black), and “It’s complicated.”[2] But, in its efforts to catch down to other segregationist states in the post-Reconstruction era, began to define anyone with “any traceable amount” of Black ancestry—i.e., with any identifiable Black ancestor—as “Black” (Omi 1997). As one legal scholar explains it:

For generations, the boundaries of the African-American race have been formed by a rule, informally known as the “one drop rule,” which, in its colloquial definition, provides that one drop of Black blood makes a person Black. In more formal, sociological circles, the rule is known as a form of “hypodescent” and its meaning remains basically the same: anyone with a known Black ancestor is considered Black. Over the generations, this rule has not only shaped countless lives, it has created the African-American race as we know it today, and it has defined not just the history of this race but a large part of the history of America. (Hickman 1997, 1163)

Despite winning a case that reached the U.S. Supreme Court, Louisiana revised its statues in 1970 so that those who have less than one-thirty-second Black ancestry—one Black great-great-great-grandparent—would not be classified as Black. Still, by that definition, people such as myself and Susie Guillory Phipps, an erstwhile white woman who sued the state in 1977 when she applied for a birth certificate and found the state identified her as “Col.”, i.e., “colored” (Trillin 2016, 172).

Keep in mind that Phipps grew up in a time where the question of racial identity literally determined one’s legal status in addition to social status. Most of the time, any discriminatory effects were dealt based on appearance, not on vital records that few people could or would see. That appearance was based on features such as hair type, but especially skin color. The source of the discrimination was (and is) not limited to members who identify as of another race. The sinister aspect to all this is that colorism was (and is) often a Black-on-Black[3] “thing.”[4] In general, the lighter one’s skin tone, the more advantages that person had (or has) in terms of social status, employment and advancement opportunities, mate choice and more (Brown 2009; Gasman and Abiola 2016; Harrison 2010; Hunter 2002; Keith and Herring 1991; Kerr 2005; Maddox and Gray 2002; Norwood 2015; and Ross 1997).

According to Trillin, Phipps said she was “sick for three days,” upon seeing what the birth certificate said. She believed all her life that she was white. She was treated all her life as she was white. Jim Crow, having been struck down years earlier, was no longer a threat to her life as a white woman. If she had said nothing, no one would have known the state defined her as anything but white. Even Jack Westholtz, the state official responsible for correcting errors on vital records, said “Susie looks like a white person.” But, as Trillin noted, she refused to accept the record and kept fighting to change it. For reasons understandable only by Phipps—who claimed to have no problems with Black people—she fought to have her race changed on the record. The fight seemed quixotic at best as it made no legal sense. But, in the Louisiana of the 1970s, there were cultural factors at play that may give justification to her quest.

Jim Crow laws, such as the racial classification law in Louisiana that Phipps challenged, negated any social advantages a light-skinned descendants of Africans—such as Homer Plessy, whose lawsuit over rail accommodations led to the Supreme Court’s heinous Plessy v. Ferguson decision[5]—once might have had. Attorney Albion W. Tourgée, in his brief on behalf of Plessy, argued that the benefits that accrued from being a member of the dominant race—white—constituted a type of property, i.e., “this reputation which has an actual pecuniary value” (Tourgée 1895, 8). Tourgée goes on to elaborate upon what, in my experience, was a reasonable challenge to the status quo at the time. In a land where “all men are [supposed to be] created equal,” how could the apartheid system known as Jim Crow be allowed to stand:

How much would it be worth to a young many entering upon the practice of law, to be regarded as a white man rather than a colored one? Six-sevenths of the population are white. Nineteen-twentieths of the property of the country is owned by white people. Ninety-nine hundredths of the business opportunities are in the control of white people. These propositions are rendered even more startling by the intensity of feeling which excludes the colored man from the friendship and companionship of the white man. Probably most white persons if given a choice, would prefer death to life in the United States as colored persons. Under these conditions, is it possible to conclude that the reputation of being white is not property? Indeed, is it not the most valuable sort of property, being the master-key that unlocks the golden door of opportunity? (Tourgée 1895, 9)

For some today, Tourgée’s notion of whiteness as property may sound odd; but substitute “privilege”—the term in vogue today—for “property” and his questions make perfect sense. 250 years of slavery and another 100 or more of segregation created what Tourgée predicted would be a race-based caste system:

There is no law of the United States, or of the State of Louisiana defining the limits of race—who are white and who are “colored”? By what rule then shall any tribunal be guided in determining racial character? It may be said that all those should be classified as colored in whom appears a visible admixture of colored blood. By what law? With what justice? Why not count every one as white in whom is visible any trace of white blood? There is but one reason to wit, the domination of the white race. Slavery not only introduced the rule of caste but prescribed its conditions, in the interests of that institution. The trace of color raised the presumption of bondage and was a bar to citizenship. The law in question is an attempt to apply this rule to the establishment of a legalized caste-distinction among citizens. (Tourgée 1895, 11)

Phipps, unfortunately, was trapped. No matter how strenuously she argued, her racial identity was fixed by state law. Westholtz, for reasons that mystify many, fought defend the law. But, as Trillin writes:

Instead, he marshaled an elaborate defense of Susie Guillory’s birth certificate. Before he was finished, he had accumulated two large cardboard boxes full of exhibits—dozens of pages of depositions, a genealogy that went back to the eighteenth century, and a chart that depicted the race of the Guillory family according to something called the Robertson Fontenot System of Visual Percentage Analysis. (Trillin 2016, 174-175)

To be fair, Westholtz viewed vital records as historical documents—no argument from this quarter—and was defending their integrity. He also told Trillin that he was hoping to produce a test case that would get Louisiana’s law declared unconstitutional.

That was not the way events worked out. Despite a change in regulations that would have allowed Phipps an abbreviated version of her birth certificate that did not mention her race—a change Westholtz informed her of through her attorney—she continued the fight, spending at least $40,000 on the case even before it was denied a hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1986.

After all that effort, she lost.

Ironically, three years before the Supreme Court’s decision, Louisiana Gov. Dave Treen signed a law that got the state out of the business of race classification.

—

My personal “prologue” is an effort, long-winded though it may be, to dive into the apparent central irony of Get Out: People who perceive themselves superior to those of another race and who would, in prior decades, fight just as hard as Phipps to avoid being classified as a “lesser” human are nevertheless willing to embed themselves into the bodies of those of the less desirable race in order to benefit from the actual superiority (in some respects) of that inferior race. In the case of Get Out, it is the Armitage family and their guests, all white except for (in a twist that did not pass unnoticed by this descendant of a Chinese “laundryman” who wrote letters to the federal government warning it of the danger posed by Japan in the 1930s) a Japanese person who bid—in a scene reminiscent of slave auction—for the use of a Black man’s or woman’s body for their own purposes, though to use those bodies in a fashion that is arguably even more sinister that the exploitation of African slaves for white profits.[6] To call the ultimate goal of the bidders a demonic possession of Chris Washington’s body is not much, if any, of a stretch. Whether or not a denizen of hell is involved, their purpose is certainly demonic.

From the backstory, it appears the Armitage family has long secretly embraced white supremacy, though, when the patriarch of the family, Roman Armitage (Richard Herd) is beaten for a spot on the 1936 U.S. Olympic team by Jesse Owens, he is forced to confront the limitations of his “race.”[7] While his delusions of white superiority may be shaken, his sense of white privilege is not, and for decades he and his family work on a way to literally take over a black person’s body by—and the science is glossed over here, without any actual loss to the plot—grafting the executive areas of a white person’s brain onto the motor- and basic life function-control areas of a black person’s brain. It is, in essence, a biological metaphor for slavery in which the white plantation owner makes the decisions and reaps the benefits of those decisions, while coerced black labor does the actual work. As Jim Hudson (Stephen Root), the blind art dealer who purchases Chris Washington in the slave auction puts it, “I want your eyes.” The only honorable aspect of Hudson’s declaration is his complete honesty about his motives.

While the trans-Atlantic slave trade depended in large part on prisoners of war and victims of slaving raids, the “slave trade” in Get Out is fueled by the kidnapping of unwitting victims lured to the Armitage estate by the sexual wiles of Rose Armitage. In some ways, the lure reminds me of an interview by William Styron who, when discussing the controversy over his novel, “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” argued that Black men (and, in Get Out’s case, Black women) desired white women.[8] The trope of unrestrained African sexuality is a central conceit of Thomas Dixon Jr.’s novel The Clansman and D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation.

Once the victim is in their power, he or she is brainwashed so that the transition to possession is made easier and more likely to be successful. The video presentation by Roman Armitage is similar to literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries encouraging slaves to submit to their masters. The masters assure the slave that such submission is best for all concerned—even that it will lead to “… the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”[9] Roman Arbitage’s message, delivered in a soothing tone that would do Mr. Rogers proud, is just as much a perversion of what Fred Rogers stood for (in life and television), as slave-owners’ attempts to use the Bible to justify their dominance of their fellow humans. Here is one such passage employed to encourages slaves’ submission:

5 Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ;

6 Not with eyeservice, as menpleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart;

7 With good will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men:

8 Knowing that whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord, whether he be bond or free. (Eph. 6:5-8 KJV)

The implication is clear: Be submissive in this world if you want to get to paradise in the next. Certainly, such a scheme works great for the masters. But the evidence of slave resistance, such as Gabriel’s Rebellion or Nat Turner’s Revolt, as well as the numerous lesser acts of resistance like sabotaging plantation equipment and working slowly, suggest that slaves—despite their alleged lack of intellectual development[10]—were not as easily convinced.

In Get Out, the victims of the Armitage’s scheme appear to submit, but there is evidence that all is not well—despite what Roman Armitage claims in his promotional video. In one scene, the Armitage’s “servant” Georgina (Betty Gabriel) apologizes for tampering with Chris Washington’s phone. What the viewer does not know until the climax is that Georgina hosts the matriarch of the Armitage clan. That matriarch is the one who tampered with Washington’s phone, not Georgina. When her body is forced to apologize, she wants to warn Chris to leave and cannot. The result is an awkward smile worthy of some 1950s television illusion of maternal bliss, but it is accompanied by tears.

Another act of slave rebellion gives the movie its title. In one scene, Chris Washington takes a group photo of the guests who have arrived for an ostensible party—but which is actually the slave auction—with his mobile phone. One of the members in the group is Andre Logan King (LaKeith Stanfield), a young Black man fawned over by a middle-aged white woman, Philomena King (Geraldine Singer), who is one of the products of the Armitage procedure. Chris’s phone has the flash activated, and when he takes the shot, the burst of light breaks the mind control over King, who, in brief burst of self-control, rushes at Chris to tell him “GET OUT!”

Chris takes his time to heed the warning, by which time he is trapped by the Armitages and prepped for the procedure. But, like Br’er Rabbit caught with the tar baby, Br’er Rabbit figures out a way out of the trap. One of his ticks, revealed in a flashback at the time of the death of his mother, is clawing at furniture. In what passes for the Armitage dungeon is bound to a stuffed chair, and claws through the leather covering and notices the stuffing inside. He uses that stuffing in his ears to break the auditory clues with which Missy Armitage, a therapist, uses to hypnotize their victims and gain control of their minds. One the appointed date of the brain-grafting surgery, he breaks free of his captors in an escape worthy of the 1839 mutiny aboard the slave ship Amistad.

But not quite. First, he finds the keys to Rose Armitage’s car and runs over Gloria. Feeling remorse—stemming from guilt over his own mother’s death—he picks her up and places her in the car and starts to drive away. Rose, alerted by the commotion, tries to shoot Chris in the fleeing car as he is also getting away with her grandmother (encased in Georgina’s body). With the car now undriveable, Christ tries to walk away, but is tackled by another Armitage servant, Walter (Marcus Henderson), who is also the host of Roman Armitage. Chris uses the flash trick to try to break the Armitage’s control of Walter’s mind.

At first, that seems not to work. When Rose walks up to the two men, ready to shoot Chris, Walter asks for the gun so that he can shoot Chris himself. Chris, mystified, then watches as Walter shoots Rose first, then turns the gun on himself. Walter is dead, and Rose lay bleeding. Chris comes over, considers finishing her off, but cannot. In the end, like Harriet Tubman leading escaped slaves to freedom along the Underground Railroad, Chris’s friend Rod Williams (Lil Rey Howery), a Transportation Security Administration agent who had been concerned about Chris’s lengthy absence, drives up to rescue Chris from the scene.

—

On the whole, Get Out is a metaphor for the African American experience from 1619, when the first African slaves were sold at Jamestown, to today when many in our nation still struggle with the notion that Black Lives Matter. And the ending—a more optimistic sequence than the one Peele originally filmed—emphasizes the importance of Black self-empowerment. It reminds us of the sacrifice of the 54th Massachusetts, an all-Black regiment in the Union Army in its assault on the Confederacy’s Fort Wagner in South Carolina in 1863. It calls forth the ghost of Malcolm X, in particular one of the lines in his first public speech as founder of the Organization for Afro-American Unity on June 28, 1964:

A race of people is like an individual man; until it uses its own talent, takes pride in its own history, expresses its own culture, affirms its own selfhood, it can never fulfill itself.

In other words, we must be willing to make the sacrifices to liberate ourselves rather than wait for someone to do the work for us. Frankly, the Armitages might have been better off had they heeded Malcolm X.

Editors Note: This piece was originally written for an African American literature class at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College and submitted on July 25, 2021.

References

Brown, Letisha Engracia Cardoso. 2009. ““If You’re Black, Get Back!” The Color Complex: Issues of Skin-Tone Bias in the Workplace.” Ethnic Studies Review 32 (2):120-132. doi: 10.1525/esr.2009.32.2.120.

Gasman, Marybeth, and Ufuoma Abiola. 2016. “Colorism Within the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).” Theory Into Practice 55 (1):39-45. doi: 10.1080/00405841.2016.1119018.

Harrison, Matthew S. 2010. “Colorism: The Often Un-Discussed-Ism in America’s Workforce.” Jury Expert 22:67-81.

Hickman, Christine B. 1997. “The Devil and the One Drop Rule: Racial Categories, African Americans, and the U.S. Census.” Michigan Law Review 95 (5):1161-1265. doi: 10.2307/1290008.

Hunter, Margaret L. 2002. “”If You’re Light You’re Alright”: Light Skin Color as Social Capital for Women of Color.” Gender and Society 16 (2):175-193.

Jefferson, Thomas. 1787. Notes on the State of Virginia. London: John Stockdale.

Keith, Verna M., and Cedric Herring. 1991. “Skin Tone and Stratification in the Black Community.” American Journal of Sociology 97 (3):760-778.

Kerr, Audrey Elisa. 2005. “The Paper Bag Principle: Of the Myth and the Motion of Colorism.” The Journal of American Folklore 118 (469):271-289.

Lawrence, David. 2004. “A Rational Basis for Race.” The Lancet 364 (9448):1845-1846. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(04)17459-X.

Maddox, Keith B., and Stephanie A. Gray. 2002. “Cognitive Representations of Black Americans: Reexploring the Role of Skin Tone.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28 (2):250-259. doi: 10.1177/0146167202282010.

Norwood, Kimberly Jade. 2015. “”If You Is White, You’s Alright….” Stories About Colorism in America.” Washington University Global Studies Law Review 14 (4):585-607.

Omi, Michael. 1997. “Racial Identity and the State: The Dilemmas of Classification.” Law & Inequality: A Journal of Theory and Practice 15:7-23.

Peele, Jordan, dir. Get Out. 2017; USA: Universal Pictures. Film.

Ross, Louie E. 1997. “Mate Selection Preferences Among African American College Students.” Journal of Black Studies 27 (4):554-569.

Shabazz, Malcolm X. 1964. “Malcolm X’s Speech at the Founding Rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity.” BlackPast.org, accessed 25 Jun 2021. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/speeches-african-american-history/1964-malcolm-x-s-speech-founding-rally-organization-afro-american-unity/

Tourgée, Albion W. 1895. Plessy V. Ferguson: Brief for Plaintiff in Error.

Trillin, Calvin. 2016. “Black or White.” In Jackson, 1964: And Other Dispatches from Fifty Years of Reporting on Race in America, 172-187. New York: Random House. Original edition, 1986.

Yelvington, Kevin A. 2005. “African Diaspora in the Americas.” In Encyclopedia of Diasporas: Immigrant and Refugee Cultures Around the World, edited by Melvin Ember, Carol R. Ember and Ian Skoggard, 24-35. Boston, MA: Springer US.

[1] Peele, Jordan, dir. Get Out. (2017; USA: Universal Pictures), Film.

[2] Obviously, the white folks drawing up complicated racial classification schemes as discussed in Yelvington (2005) had no knowledge of recombination and how it can scramble the genetic makeup of sexually reproducing species.

[3] It would be appropriate to substitute any race of choice for “Black-on-Black,” as the phenomenon—colorism—is not limited to the African American community.

[4] Decades ago, while covering a minor league baseball game, I interviewed a Black ball player who had stolen several bases that evening. I asked him where he got his speed, and he said, “It’s a Black thing.”

[5] Plessy v. Ferguson 163 US 537 (1896).

[6] The scene was not without its comedic brilliance. Potential buyers used bingo cards to signify their bids. Personally, I cannot think of anything more “white” or “square” than bingo.

[7] I enclose the word “race” here in quotes because it is a scientifically nebulous concept, though regional genetic differences (in addition to lifestyle differences) may play a role in health (Lawrence 2004). Yes, I am citing myself, but the citation is, I believe, justified.

[8] I saw the interview decades ago on what I think was a PBS station. I have no idea what to cite, however.

[9] Of course, this quote is from Casablanca, not Get Out. The basis for a beautiful friendship between Rick and Louis in Casablanca is real; not so much between the Armitages and any of their victims in Get Out.

[10] “I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind” (Jefferson 1787, 239).