The Movie ‘Get Out’ Is a Strong Antidote to the Myth of ‘Postracial’ America

The touchstone scene in the new horror film “Get Out” depicts a 20-something white woman named Rose appraising the sculpted torsos of black athletes on a laptop as she sits in her bedroom sipping milk through a straw. In another context — say, in the popular HBO television series “Girls” — this would be an unremarkable example of a millennial catching a glimpse of beefcake on the way to bed.

In this case, the director Jordan Peele wants the audience to see Rose as what she is: the 21st-century equivalent of the plantation owner who studies the teeth and muscles of the human beings he is about to buy at a slave market. Like her antebellum predecessors, Rose — who has recently delivered her black boyfriend into the hands of her monstrous family — is on the hunt for handsomest, buffest specimen she can find.

“Get Out” speaks in several voices on several themes. It subverts the horror genre itself — which has the well-documented habit of killing off black characters first. It comments on the re-emergence of white supremacy at the highest levels of American politics. It lampoons the easy listening racism that so often lies behind the liberal smile in the “postracial” United States. And it probes the systematic devaluation of black life that killed people like Trayvon Martin, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice and Eric Garner.

The film is a disquisition on the continuing impact of slavery in American life. Among other things, it argues that present-day race relations are heavily determined by the myths that were created to justify enslavement — particularly the notion that black people were never fully human.

The project of reconnecting this history to contemporary life is well underway. Historians have shown, for example, that slavery, once abolished under law, continued by other means, not least of all as disenfranchisement, mass incarceration and forced labor. Lynchings, those carnivals of blood once attended by thousands of people, morphed into a sanitized, state-sanctioned death penalty that is still disproportionately used against people of color.

Novelists have followed the same line of inquiry, urged on by the desire to debunk the delusional rhetoric of “postracialism” that gained currency when the country elected its first African-American president.

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