Breakthrough Writer: Get Out Lesson #5: Gaslighting, Stealing, and Cultural Appropriation

Writing Effective Paragraphs

Since paragraphs are the building blocks of our essays, we should ask ourselves: What makes a strong, effective paragraph?

Salience

First, a paragraph should be salient, meaning the writer is addressing a topic that is remarkable, meaningful, relevant, and timely. When writers are salient and relevant by addressing the needs of the time, they achieve the principle of Kairos, meaning that you are impressing your reader with ideas that are timely and are relevant to “the times we live in”--zeitgeist.

Main Idea or Topic Sentence

Second, a paragraph must have a single topic, often stated in a topic sentence but sometimes states through implication or suggestion. Whether or not there is a topic sentence, the paragraph will be governed by a controlling idea or what is called the main idea.

Unity

Third, a paragraph must achieve unity by consisting of supporting details that all point to the topic sentence or main topic.

Coherence

Fourth, a paragraph must have coherence, the state of being clear from the logical flow of one sentence to the other, often enhanced by appropriate transitions.

To summarize, paragraphs must have salience, a controlling idea, unity, and coherence.

Example #1 An argument in a thesis paragraph

The proposal to make community college parking lots into homeless shelters is a salient example of good intentions ushering us into the bowels of hell. The misguided plan to make parking lots into a homeless sanctuary will curdle into chaos, stench, and criminality. For one, colleges cannot afford enough law enforcement officers to patrol a vast area rife with assault, thievery, and other criminality, resulting in bankrupting the college with lawsuits. Second, the college cannot afford enough bathrooms to accommodate the thousands of people, which will in turn make the college a giant sewer that contaminates the entire community with infectious diseases. Third, the majority of people will look at the college as a cesspool of criminality and disease and avoid attending this lame excuse for a college, resulting in enrollment numbers so low that the college will soon cease to exist.

Example #2: A rebuttal to an argument

The above rebuttal against the proposal to turn community college parking lots into homeless shelters is a classic use of the slippery slope fallacy in which someone cries Chicken Little and all worst-case scenarios while assuming the parking lot plan won’t have any specific contingencies designed to prevent the panic-based emotionally-charged scenarios that have been hysterically described above. The above hysterics are in truth a smokescreen designed to make a selfish excuse for ignoring those students for whom horrible life circumstances beyond their control have put them in a homeless situation. Regarding the Hysterical Critic’s contention that there will be criminality in the parking lot, obviously colleges will have a maximum occupancy at the level of which its law enforcement feels comfortable creating a secure place for the students. Regarding the Hysterical Critic’s claim the college will “become a giant sewer,” obviously campus engineers will put enough bathrooms on the premises in proportion to the maximum occupancy allowed. Regarding the fear tactic that non-homeless students won’t enroll in the college, this is a paranoid scenario based on the irrational premise that the college won’t have any limits on the amount of homeless people it accommodates and under what restrictions those accommodations will be based. Let us, therefore, address the needs of our homeless population and leave the selfish Chicken Little arguments in the argumentative dustbin where they deserve.

Example #3: An argument with a topic sentence

Sure, Universal Basic Income sucks. It’s hardly enough money to create economic justice. It’s surely a pacifier for the masses who are getting punk-fed the bare minimum to live a half-decent existence. I’m also certain that UBI will relegate most of us to some sweaty, dank room where we’ll intoxicate ourselves with a myriad of unsavory substances while looking on with bloodshot eyes at some entertainment or other on YouTube or Netflix. We will grow fat, complacent, brain-dead. We’ll become less than human. We’ll become more like zombies, slogging through life without an ounce of pride or dignity as we live a sedentary life without individual goals, responsibility, or life purpose. We will be soulless pods hooked up to our private entertainment centers while the 1%, the real people, pull the strings, create technology that advances civilization and enjoy the spoils of their efforts as full human beings flourishing in some opulent environment while the rest of us poor UBI-receiving bots live like crammed sardines in shared housing with our equally depressed, brain-dead zombie roommates. So am I arguing against UBI? Hell no. Even if our lives are as crappy as the one I described above, the life without UBI as we head for the Great Unemployment Age presents an even greater hellish existence, one with starvation, a lack of basic medical supplies and treatment, and abject homelessness. Yeah, UBI sucks, but not getting UBI sucks even more. Don’t count on the government to share the 1%’s wealth with the rest of us. The 1% will only share as much as they have to, and they have calculated that giving us just enough UBI so that we don’t become a raging, lawless mob is worth the 4-trillion UBI annual price tag. We should just admit we lost the class war. We are now in the unenviable position where we can either take our UBI pittance, which sucks, or not take our UBI table scraps, which sucks even more. That is our dilemma. We must take this painful truth on the chin and move on with our crappy lives. The alternative is certain death.

Example #4: A counterargument with a topic sentence

The above argument, which essentially paints us as starving dogs that should be grateful for the table scraps of UBI is so full of grotesque logical fallacies that the person who wrote this specious argument should be thrown into Logical Fallacy Prison. For one, the writer gives us a false dilemma of only two choices: A crappy life with UBI or an even crappier life without UBI. There are other possibilities that the writer does not address because those possibilities present an inconvenience to his argument. For example, some people will continue to work and use UBI to supplement their income. Others will use UBI to fund their higher education, but the above writer is too busy enjoying his despair to consider these possibilities. Secondly, the writer presents a pessimism that is unfounded on evidence. He seems to think dehumanization from UBI is inevitable, yet he presents no facts to back up his claim. Rather, he indulges in his personal crapulent attitude and wishes to impose it on the rest of us, as if he’s doing us a favor by lavishing us with some universal truth, yet he is not. He is merely a Minister of Darkness contaminating us with his gospel of despair. Finally, he assumes the worst-case scenario of UBI and paints a broad brush over the human reaction to receiving guaranteed income to fulfill our basic life needs without addressing the complexities and unknowable, tentative outcomes. In short, the above writer is a grotesque nihilist who is hell-bent on infecting us with his anguish and despair. For the truth about UBI, I suggest we look elsewhere.

Example #5: A personal narrative with a topic sentence

We need stories to explain to us our ever-changing role in this world. Otherwise, we are doomed to be forever infantile. As an example, when I was a toddler, I had assigned the name Geekee to my favorite blanket, a white silken prized possession that became inseparable to me like one of my appendages. Tattered and mottled with yellowish spots, Geekee was my cocoon of silvery spun silk, which I carried with me everywhere I went. At night, I rubbed the blanket’s corners on my cheek, the pleasant tickling sensation lulling me to sleep. To my consternation, my parents were not as enamored with Geekee as I was. They complained that Geekee smelled. It was threadbare. It had visible stains that I paraded to the public who must have believed that my parents were too cheap to buy me a new blanket. At four years of age I had outgrown Geekee, they said, and it was time Geekee and I part ways, a suggestion that sent me into a rage. This battle between my parents and me continued until one day, as we were moving across the country from Florida to California my father slyly opened his window and told me to look out the window opposite his, for he said there was a baby alligator on the side of the road. As I looked in vain to spot the alligator, my father ripped Geekee from my hands and threw it out his open window. It all happened so fast that I didn’t know my father had grabbed my blanket. Instead, I believed his lie that the powerful wind had sucked Geekee from my grasp and had flung the blanket out of the window. I told my father to stop the car at once. We had to retrieve Geekee. But my father said we had to keep on going. Besides, he said, Geekee was now keeping the baby alligator warm. With no mother to fend for him, the little reptile needed the blanket’s warmth far more than I did. Imagining the baby alligator swathed in my blanket helped me part ways with Geekee, for I was now convinced that there was a creature on this planet who needed Geekee more than I did. When I was 15, I worked out at Walt’s Gym with a 25-year old bodybuilder, Bull, who had his own Geekee--Gilligan’s Island. When the local station took his favorite TV show off the air, he was so overcome with rage that he kicked his mother’s TV screen with his combat boots. He remained inconsolable, and I was sad that I could not share a story with him that might wean himself off Gilligan’s Island forever.

Example #6 Personal narrative with a topic sentence

As a thirteen-year-old in 1974, I had reached the conclusion that adult life was a loathsome existence and therefore not for me. I had started my training at Walt’s Gym in Hayward, California. Converted from a chicken coop in the 1950s, the gym was a swamp of fungus and bacteria. Members complained of incurable athlete’s foot and some claimed there were strains of fungus and mold that had not yet been identified in scientific journals. Quite at home in the fungal shower stalls was an oversized frog. The pro wrestlers had nicknamed the old-timer frog Charlie. The locker always had a bankrupt divorcee or other in a velour top and gold chain hogging the payphone while having a two-hour-long talk with his attorney about his bleak life choices. There was an unused outdoor swimming pool in the back with murky water black with plague and dead rats. A lonely octogenarian named Wally, who claimed to be a model for human anatomy textbooks, worked out for several hours before spending an equal time in the sauna and shower, completing his grooming with a complete-body talcum powder treatment so that when he spoke to you, he did so embalmed in a giant talcum cloud. The radio played the same hits over and over: Elvin Bishop’s “Fooled Around and Fell in Love” and The Eagles’ “New Kid in Town.” What stood out to me was that I was just a kid navigating in an adult world, and the gym, like the barbershop, was a public square that allowed me to hear adult conversations about divorces, hangovers, financial ruin, the cost of sending kids to college, the burdens of taking care of elderly parents. I realized then that I was at the perfect age: Old enough to grow big and strong but young enough to be saved from the drudgery and tedium of adult life. It became clear to me then that I never wanted to grow up.

Example #7: Brief Movie Critique with a lack of unity due to some rambling:

White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch, a documentary currently running on Netflix about a clothing company that sold its clothes by hyping chiseled bodies and “exclusive” beauty status in the late 90s to early 2000s before its collapse, is a decent, not great, documentary, but it’s worth watching for the pleasure of watching such an immoral business fall flat on its butt. It gives you a taste of the pre-social media zeitgeist and makes you wonder if all those chiseled “hot bods” might get lost in the mix in the age of Instagram and social influencers. My favorite line from the documentary is when a culture critic says the genius of Abercrombie & Fitch is not in delivering consumer goods to what the market dictates, but rather telling the consumers what they wanted, essentially implanting desires in their heads that they never had had before. Now that’s genius. On a personal note, I’ve never been inside an Abercrombie & Fitch store, but I have had students over the years tell me how cheap the clothing is, how they’ll find tears in the armpit of their shirts and loose threads within just a few days. The company was all smoke and mirrors, selling the chimera of exclusive beauty and status. It did so in part by exploiting racist mythology. Good riddance to its demise.

Example #8: Thesis paragraph

In Jordan Peele's masterpiece Get Out, the hero Chris Washington must survive and resist The Sunken Place, which is evident through Chris' pressure to code-switch at the Armitage home, his confrontation of numerous microaggressions, which erode his psyche and question his humanity; Rose's gaslighting of Chris, which makes him not only question his reality but his sanity; and the stealing of black bodies, which is a metaphor for cultural appropriation and exploitation of African-Americans in a rigged system.

If McMahon Were Writing Essay 4, This Would be His Outline:

Paragraph 1, define The Sunken Place

Paragraph 2, Thesis: Argue that The Sunken Place is a critique, not of Southern Jim Crow racism, but of white liberal racism in the form of pressuring black people to code-switch, afflicting black people with microaggressions, and inflicting economic racism on the Black community.

Paragraph 3: Show The Sunken Place of code-switching by comparing Chris to Aaron in Atlanta Season 3, Episode 9.

Paragraphs 4 and 5: Compare the microaggressions Chris experiences to Loquarreous in Atlanta Season 3, Episode 1, "Three Slaps."

Paragraph 5: Compare microaggression Chris experiences to those shown in Atlanta Season 3, Episode 7, "Trini 2 De Bone."

Paragraph 6: Show that neoliberal America has done little to improve the economic landscape for African-Americans by examining the issues in Atlanta Season 3, Episode 4, "The Big Pay Back." Notice in Get Out that whites steal black bodies; this is a metaphor for all kinds of stealing, including wealth and cultural stealing (cultural appropriation) and shows America as a kleptocracy, a country built on a foundation of stealing.

Paragraphs 7 and 8: Explain why Get Out succeeds while Them fails as a critique of racism.

Paragraph 9: Conclusion, a powerful restatement of your thesis

Body Paragraphs

Two. Code-Switching is a cause and symptom of The Sunken Place:

When black people try to make white people more comfortable or try to pass as white, black people will code-switch, assuming the body language, vocal intonations, and mannerisms associated with whiteness.

The implicit message in code-switching is “White is good. Black is bad. I will try to win you over by being white.”

The motivation for code-switching is shame, self-rejection, and self-apology.

Code-switching teaches us that racism is not merely a bias against people of color; it is a bias against the culture of black people.

There is a cruel irony to code-switching: A lot of people want to act black, be cool, and be down, so they’ll appropriate black mannerisms and speech as their whims dictate; however, these same white people will expect black people to code-switch white to make them more comfortable.

Some other examples of code-switching are in the movie Sorry to Bother You and in the Atlanta episode 9 of season 3.

Three. Microaggressions are a cause of The Sunken Place:

Microaggressions are “small racist acts or comments” done in a spirit of ignorance, condescending patronization, discomfort, or all of the above.

Microaggressions are caused by the following personality traits:

bull-headed ignorance

arrogance

insensitivity

presumptuousness

crassness (social nincompoop who blunders in human relations)

laziness

narcissistic entitlement

Buzzfeed has a good list to get acquainted with some common examples.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/hnigatu/racial-microagressions-you-hear-on-a-daily-basis

Get Out is full of microaggressions with white people trying to hard to ingratiate themselves, using excessive flattery toward Chris, talking about the great physical wonders that Chris must possess.

Jeremy says that with Chris’ “genetic makeup,” he’d be a great MMA fighter.

Microaggressions can also be expressed as unintentional racism from the privilege of systemic racism. This, too, is a cause of The Sunken Place.

In Get Out, we see intentional racism, a willful attempt to steal black bodies as a metaphor for cultural appropriation.

But we also see unintentional racism. For example, when the cop asks for Chris’ driver's license, Rose becomes self-righteous and hostile, acting like she is sticking up for Chris when her white privilege fails to see she is putting Chris in even more danger.

Dean Armitage is another example. He tries too hard to be nonracist, bringing up his love for Obama every chance he can get. His saccharine manner is condescending and fake. He is a man with something to hide.

When people lard you with their friendly manner like Dean does, they are afflicting you with toxic positivity.

Then there is Jeremy, Rose’s brother, who says to Chris, “With your genetic makeup, you could be a great fighter.”

Four. Gaslighting is a cause of The Sunken Place:

“Don’t trust your senses. I’ll tell you what the reality is.”

Gaslighting is when the bully makes the victim feel like the culprit by turning reality upside down. The gaslighter is so incessant in his gaslighting that he wears down his victim through sheer fatigue.

See “Gaslighting, Explained”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eN4la0xOBdM

See “How to Spot the Hidden Signs Someone Is Gaslighting”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FISZshe9L3s

See “10 Examples of What Gaslighting Sounds Like”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3t-Jvrr2OY

In Get Out, we see examples of Gaslighting when Chris is worried that Rose’s white parents will be uncomfortable that she is bringing a black boyfriend to their house.

“Do they know I’m black?” he asks.

But Rose repeatedly dismisses his concern as a non-issue. He’s crazy for being so worried even when his past experiences tell him otherwise.

Five. Cultural Appropriation is a cause of The Sunken Place:

When people of the dominant or privileged culture steal the culture of the less privileged for their own desires, they are committing what is called cultural appropriation.

In Get Out, the stealing of black bodies is a metaphor for cultural appropriation.

See the video “What Is Cultural Appropriation?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQgF1f557YY

Paragraphs 7 and 8:

Counterargument-rebuttal paragraphs in which you address the possible criticism that Get Out, like the Amazon Prime series Them, is making a spectacle of black suffering, helplessness, and victimization for consumer entertainment and as such displaying this racism in such a flagrant form is exploitive. Do the journeys of Chris Washington and his friend Rod Williams have enough dignity, self-agency, courage, mental toughness, and resistance to avoid the same charges exacted upon the TV series Them? Explain.

In paragraph 7, you might summarize the criticism exacted upon the Amazon Prime series Them.

In paragraph 8, you might then argue whether or not Jordan Peele’s Get Out falls into the same pitfalls as Them.

Paragraph 9: Your conclusion is a short dramatic restatement of your thesis.

Works Cited with a minimum of 5 sources in MLA format follow on the last page.