Don't put the movie-goer in the Sunken Place (avoid excessive victimization)
Jordan Peele has by all accounts made a cinematic masterpiece in Get Out. He has taken the horror genre combined with satire to show the horrors of racism and the victimization that ensues.
But this victimization is balanced by in-depth characters, black characters who see how white people perceive them and they overcome the white perspective and are ultimately able to tell their own stories and define themselves.
Because of this, Get Out is never a salacious spectacle of violence against black people. It never indulges in gratuitous racism just for spectacle’s sake. The movie never paints its black characters as helpless victims doomed to misery. For example, Chris Washington uses cotton balls, symbols of slavery, to set himself free, and deer antlers, the symbol of black sacrifice for white economic gain during slavery, to defend himself from his enemies. Ron Williams uses his courage, smarts, and cunning to outsmart Rose and her minions of white racist cult members. Like the celebrated HBO show Watchmen, a superhero TV series based on the Tulsa massacre of 1921, Get Out balances racial victimization with black heroism. There has to be a balance.
We even see this balance in the Netflix series High on the Hog, which is based on Jessica B. Harris’ book of the same name. Hosted and narrated by food writer Stephen Satterfield, we go to West Africa and see where millions of slaves were forced on ships leaving for the Americas, but this human tragedy is given a story of strength and love: Slaves influenced food culture in the United States and the world and their food preparation was an expression of love and dignity for each other that was denied them from the whites.
In contrast, the TV series Them focuses on victimization and little else.
Not surprisingly, many in the black community have been unhappy with the TV series Them, which addresses racism against black people during The Great Migration of the 1950s when many African Americans moved from the South to Los Angeles.
Vanity Fair critics Cassie Da Costa and Sonia Saraiya discuss their displeasure with the violence “against Black bodies” in their article “Who Is the Racism Horror Anthology Them Really For?”
The critics complain that Them overwhelms the audience with the “suffering of Black bodies” without ample character development and dramatic tension.
Without sufficient drama and character development, the relentless victimization becomes a form of “violence porn” with no purpose other than to give entertainment spectacle. So whereas Get Out uplifts black people by showing their struggle in the face of racism, Them, many critics point out, degrades black people by showing them as helpless victims for the entertainment of the audience.
Black Twitter agrees. Them was met with great objection on Black Twitter as participants complained that the endless spectacle of violence against black people was hollow and demeaning.
Part of the problem is length. Whereas the movie Get Out subjects the audience to two hours of racist microaggressions, slavery allusions, and violence, Them is ten long hours in a TV series format.
For ten hours, Them “returns to the same beats over and over,” says Sonia Saraiya.
We can see the challenges of making a horror genre treatment of racism: There must be sufficient character development, in-depth character development, heroism to counter helpless victimization, and dramatic tension. Otherwise, the art denigrates into a gratuitous violent spectacle.
The Need for a Hero
Variety’s Sarah Ahern article “Jordan Peele on How ‘Get Out’ Could Have Had a Darker Ending (Spoilers)” explores Jordan Peele’s artistic considerations that changed the movie’s ending.
Originally, Peele was going to have the main protagonist Chris arrested for “slaughtering” his white captors.
But testing this “more realistic” ending in front of a test audience, Peele and the film’s producers realized such an ending was a “downer.” It was missing something.
But then Peele realized something. In his words: “It was very clear that the ending needed to transform into something that gives us a hero, that gives us an escape, gives us a positive feeling when we leave this movie. There’s nothing more satisfying than seeing the audience go crazy when Rod shows up.”
Rod Williams is a man who never apologizes for who he is, he is always watching the back of his best friend, and he always outsmarts his adversaries. In other words, Rod Williams is the heroic figure that counterbalances the movie’s racism and racist aggression.
Not surprisingly, when Rod Williams shows up as the hero and gives a more triumphant ending, the test audience goes wild and Peele and the producers decided to go with triumph over defeat.
In Collider’s Adam Chitwood article “‘Get Out’ Filmmakers Explain Why They Changed the Ending,” Get Out producers, director, and actors explain the complex thought processes behind changing the ending:
McKittrick: We tested the movie with the original “sad truth” ending where, when the cop shows up, it’s an actual cop and Chris goes to jail. The audience was absolutely loving it, and then it was like we punched everybody in the gut. You could feel the air being sucked out of the room. The country was different. We weren’t in the Obama era, we were in this new world where all the racism crept out from under the rocks again. It was always an ending that we debated back and forth, so we decided to go back and shoot the pieces for the other ending where Chris wins. Henderson: I remember when they gave the verdict that Darren Wilson wouldn’t be indicted, and you felt defeated. Like, “Man! Can we catch a break?” What the original ending said was, “No, you can’t catch a break,” because that’s our reality. But the new ending gave us a break, and I think that’s why we enjoyed it so much, because we want it so badly. The similarities of the narrative are so parallel to what actually happened in Ferguson. When I have conversations with people about it, we talk about the importance of watching that black body get away to tell his story. Because you know who didn’t get to tell their own story? Trayvon Martin. Mike Brown. Philando Castile. Kaluuya: I love the original ending. It was great because of what it said about life — there’s this black guy who’s really cool and went through this trauma, got through all this racism, and in fighting for himself he gets incarcerated. That really resonated with me, because it showed me how unfair the system is. However, in hindsight, you still have that with the police lights, and Rod saves him through the black brotherhood — and also, Chris has a life, you know? He has to go out there even after he’s experienced all this racism, and people expect you to see the world in the same way when they haven’t experienced something like that. I thought that was really honest. Whitford: The original ending was making a statement that I think Jordan felt a white audience might be able to dismiss about mass incarceration. The ending he ended up with does a brilliant thing, because when Chris is strangling Rose in the driveway, you see the red police lights, and then you see the door open and it says “Airport” and it’s a huge laugh, and everybody has that same laugh and release. You understand from Chris’s POV that if the cops come, he’s a dead man. That is absolutely brilliant, non-lecturing storytelling. Peele: I think my improv training just put me in this mind frame of, with each problem, there’s not one solution, there’s not two solutions, there’s an infinite amount of great solutions. That includes the ending. When I realized the original, downer ending wasn’t working, I didn’t freak out. I looked at it as an opportunity to come up with a better ending.
Part of Get Out’s triumph is that Chris survives as a free man and he is able to tell his story from his eyes, not a white person’s.
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Vox’s Aja Romano article “How Get Out deconstructs racism for white people” explores the idea of deconstructing, or analyzing, racism in a horror genre.
Romano observes that the film has a rich anti-racism checklist that you won’t find in other films that address racism:
- For one, there is subtle “suburban gaslighting,” civil white people politely exacting one microaggression after another. In sum, these microaggressions equal a giant bloviating cloud of gaslighting, which is exhausting and infuriating.
- One of the great triumphs of the film is that it is never preachy or strident in its messages. Through satire, making the Armitage family act like believable jackasses, the movie is both entertaining and believable.
- The film relies on experience and drama to deliver the themes, not vice versa.
- Secondly, the main protagonist Chris Washington is very aware and very “woke” to the point that he knows that the white Armitage family is being creepy in their condescending politeness. Christ knows he is in a dangerous situation. Unfortunately, his instincts to get the hell out of this Armitage Freak Show are tempered by his politeness and his desire to ingratiate himself with his girlfriend Rose.
- Third, Get Out features no white fantasy of the black person being saved by a “white savior.” You won’t find black victims being saved by well-intentioned white people. You’ll find black people saving themselves through self-reliance, cunning, and self-agency.
- Fourth, we see the narrative unfold, not through white eyes, but through a black protagonist and as a whole the story is seen through black eyes. Through black eyes, we see the importance of Code Switching, when black people have to change their tone, voice, and persona to make white people more comfortable or less uncomfortable.
- Fifth, there is no passive, helpless victim motif here. To the contrary, fighting for one’s life, resisting by “any means necessary,” like the deer antlers scene, is one of the film’s most salient messages.
- Sixth, there must be a dimension beyond human victimization when addressing racism in a movie. For example, Chris Washington is an accomplished photographer whose self-agency causes him to resist. But other artistic venues focus too much on victimization at the exclusion of everything else.
We read in The Atlantic’s Hannah Giorgis article “Who Wants to Watch Black Pain?” that an overemphasis on suffering and victimization diminishes the art form:
While watching the most merciless moments of Them, moments in which pure racist violence is more menacing than any supernatural element, I found myself thinking not just about other Black viewers’ exasperation but also about something the director Nia DaCosta said last year. Speaking with Wired’s Jason Parham about her new adaptation of Candyman out this summer, she said that adding layers about gentrification, police violence, and lynching was crucial to her process of reimagining the horror film. But she emphasized that the genre also has room for different kinds of Black stories: “I’d love to see Black people in horror films and in horror … that’s not just about this kind of trauma and pain, but can also be about other aspects of our existence.”
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Through Chris Washington’s Eyes
In The Atlantic’s Lenika Cruz essay “In Get Out, the Eyes Have It,” the movie's plot propels us into the drama.
Chris is someone who is trained to find detail, composition, light and shade, and to capture what he sees to convey some truth about the human condition. He has trained himself to “know the world” in a very specific way.
Part of “knowing the world” is to reject being a passive player but rather to be skeptical, questioning, and full of healthy doubts. These characteristics will help Chris as his misadventure takes him to the final climax.
Lenika Cruz describes Chris as a “trained observer,” someone who can find meaning and composition in a scene that may seem insignificant to the untrained eye. “What is wrong with this picture? Why does something feel out of place? Why is it important that I capture something when it seems askew?” These are the questions of a photographer who becomes a “trained observer.”
These are the questions Jordan Peele is asked himself when he was on creepy interacial dates that required him to meet liberal white parents who couldn’t keep their microaggressions to themselves. This is the state of mind Peele wants us, the movie audience to share. By sharing this point of view, we develop a strong empathy for Chris Washington.
Lenika Cruz makes the astute observation that Chris’ camera both brings him closer to people at the Armitage house while at the same time providing the necessary distance.
He is not only a photographer who uses his artistry to develop a sense of the world, but to know when to make himself vulnerable and to make himself distant and protected.
How to see the world is a theme that brings us to one of the most horrifying parts of the movie. White art dealer Jim Hudson is blind, which Lenika Cruz posits is a metaphor for the useless colorblindness of white liberals. If Jim Hudson is both blind and colorblind, it does not stop him from his grotesque cultural appropriation.
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The Sunken Place is watching the "erasure of an entire people."
The New Yorker’s Richard Brody essay “‘Get Out’: Jordan Peele’s Radical Cinematic Vision of the World Through a Black Man’s Eyes” examines one of the movie’s central horrors: Erasing an entire people. As Brody writes:
At the time of dramatic crisis, Chris is denied the tools of his art; he has no camera on hand, and, what’s more, he’s being force-fed an audiovisual diet—through a nineteen-fifties-style television console—that is the very essence and tool of his captivity and his subjection. The Armitages aren’t creating slaves; they’re doing something that’s in a way even worse. Slaves are, at the very least, conscious of their situation and can, at least theoretically, if the opportunity arises, revolt. What the Armitages are creating is inwardly whitened black people—black people cut off from their history and their self-consciousness and, therefore, deprived of the power to rebel and to free themselves.
Held captive and forced to watch an “audiovisual diet” of 50s television, Chris is being force-fed the white narrative innocence at his expense. The result of this white narrative, for Chris, is self-erasure. This theme of erasure is explored in the Netflix series High on the Hog, about the influence of slavery on food throughout the world. We learn that history has erased much of the influence slavery has had on food. There are too many examples to chronicle here, but there is one that stands out. The show’s narrator Stephen Satterfield observes that in Charleston, South Carolina, the major port where the majority of slaves landed, most of the restaurants serving “Southern cooking” are owned by whites and “Southern cooking” is really African-American cooking, but this fact has been erased both in history and in restaurant ownership.
The American narrative of Innocence, which emphasizes American Exceptionalism, the idea that America is a morally superior country and is compelled to shine its Light throughout the world, is challenged by the narrative of Original Sin, which focuses on America’s fast economic expansion as being dependent on slavery.
The narrative of Innocence has dire consequences. It cancels or erases black identity and culture, and it exonerates America for its sins exacted upon black Americans.
In Get Out, the Armitage family is an example of white people lost and intoxicated by the narrative of Innocence. They feel entitled to erase black people for their own needs and pleasures. In Richard Brody’s words: “What the Armitages are creating is inwardly whitened black people—black people cut off from their history and their self-consciousness and, therefore, deprived of the power to rebel and to free themselves.”
Seen through the eyes of Chris Williams, Get Out is a movie that, like Black Panther, refuses to silence black voices, identity, and history, and as such, it is a triumph over those who would relegate black people to The Sunken Place.
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The Sunken Place and the False Claim of White Innocence
The New Yorker’s Rich Benjamin essay “‘Get Out’ and the Death of White Racial Innocence” explores the way the white narrative of Innocence results in moral bankruptcy and “moral apathy,” a condition seen with keen insight by famous African-American writer James Baldwin. As Benjamin writes:
“I’m terrified at the moral apathy—the death of the heart—which is happening in my country,” Baldwin adds later. In his mordant telling, Americans are consumer zombies struck by an “emotional poverty so bottomless and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep that virtually no American appears able to achieve any viable, organic connection between his public stance and his private life. This failure of the private life has always had the most devastating effect on American public conduct and on black-white relations. If [white] Americans were not so terrified of their private selves, they would never have become so dependent on what they call the Negro Problem.” Secluded in splendor, the Armitages, too, harbor desolate private struggles that lead them to inflict external racial terror.
In other words, the Armitage family is insulated by their delusion of innocence, and this insulation aids them in inflicting “racial terror” against others, including Chris Washington.
Indeed, the Armitage family would like to believe they are innocent of racism and that America as a whole has moved beyond racism to the point that America is a post-racial society. As Benjamin writes:
White racial innocence meanders across time and political context. White blindness, as Baldwin saw it, crafted the social illusion that blacks have no reasons for being bitter. This era was followed by one in which whites would giddily talk up a color-blind America. They would avoid discussing race out of a sincere ethical desire to wash the stain of racial differentiation from our nation. These types saw (and still see) themselves as Reverend King’s disciples; they prefer color-blind conversations, policies, and Supreme Court Justices. Other color-blind acolytes, however, dismiss racial debate as a distraction from real issues, such as unemployment, “broken borders,” “law and order,” and “voter fraud.” All lives matter. And, most recently, we’ve witnessed the delusion of those whites who fancy themselves and the country as post-racial: there has been a sea change in racial attitudes, thanks to President Obama’s tenure, and we are going to bury racism in a dustbin, and racial identity and distinctions have become passé.
Part of the terror of the Armitage family is their insistence that black people such as Chris Washington accept the narrative of Innocence even as they’re victimized by the Armitage’s cultural appropriation, microaggressions, and gaslighting. The Armitage family inflicts racial pain on others while maintaining a facade of sweetness, civility, and innocence, but the movie Get Out lifts the veil and reveals the ugliness underneath. As Benjamin writes:
Baldwin could have been speaking today when he said that whites are cruelly trapped between what they might like to be and what they actually are. That moment of understanding, the very instance when whites acknowledge the blunt truths that make their innocence no longer cute, let alone plausible, is what delivers profound horror—or sidesplitting laughs—in a movie as sharp as “Get Out.” What a juicy moment when Rose, on the phone with Chris’s black friend, realizes that the jig is up; her caper is about to be exposed. Rose drops her sweet face and hardens it into a stare. Her stony eyes reveal her about-face from liberal ingénue to calculating racial predator. The Brooklyn theatre exploded in guffaws. Her family’s bloody antics, like this country’s recent racial politics, had careened to that moment when everybody knows what’s what, and all bets are off.
Not only do Chris Washington and his friend Ron Williams lift the curtain to reveal the true ugliness at the Armitage residence, they overcome the ugliness and free themselves.
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Frederick Douglass and The Sunken Place
It would be irresponsible to discuss the Sunken Place without referencing the greatest American who ever lived, the freed slave, writer, orator, and abolitionist Frederick Douglass who not only articulated the Sunken Place in the anguish he poured out in his descriptions of the inhumanity of slavery but did so in the context of longing to one day be a freeman. In other words, Douglass at the lowest point of his Sunken Place would never give up hope for being free or let go of his identity as a freeman with self-agency and self-determination. We cannot emphasize that the Sunken Place is a powerful tool of instruction only when we see that it is not a capitulation to inaction and surrender to the evil of racism; instead, the Sunken Place is where might and resistance are resolved and we see that resistance to evil is a vital component of the Sunken Place.
The author of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass may be one of the first great writers to describe in detail the agony of being owned (body and soul) by other human beings and subject to their whims, greed, and cruelty.
Douglass may be one of the first great writers to describe the agony of forced sleep deprivation, starvation, overwork, arbitrary whippings, and forced illiteracy in order to give life to the white myth of black intellectual inferiority (a myth created to justify the cruelty of slavery itself).
Douglass may be the first writer to describe the agony of being forced to be a slave with a smile on your face and body language that exuded gratitude to the slavekeeper for enslaving you lest you be beaten to death for looking bored or ungrateful.
The Sunken Place Feature #1: Letting your oppressors write your narrative to aggrandize themselves and humiliate you
Douglass begins his memoir by observing that the slave masters falsely portrayed slavery to justify their depravity and to sugarcoat the agony that afflicted slaves.
Not only is slavery physically unbearable, Douglass observes, but to have your captors misrepresent you and your suffering at their barbaric hands creates a spiritual wound for which there are no words.
Heroically, Douglass defied the slave masters and taught himself to read and write so that he could bear witness to the human rights violations that happened to his people and give voice to his people. Likewise, Jordan Peele’s Get Out is told from a black protagonist’s point of view. The movie, like Douglass’ narrative, is told by a black voice.
Who gets to describe hell? The tormentor or the tormented? Clearly, the latter is the only moral answer.
The Sunken Place Feature #2: To be a nothing at birth, not human at all but property
Frederick Douglass and his fellow slaves didn’t know their birthdays because their births weren’t recorded. Symbolically, they “didn’t count” as humans. They grew up without a birthday and without knowledge of their age. It had to be estimated or counted by comparing their life circumstances to bookmarks in history.
Slaves were not allowed to ask their masters their birthdays because to do so was considered “impertinent” and disrespectful.
It was believed that Douglass’s father was a white man, a slaveholder, and he observes that slaveholders constantly fornicated with slave women, impregnated them, and disowned the babies as their children but rather counted them as slaves so these slaveholders could both gratify their lusts and increase their slave numbers at the same time.
It should be noted that these slave children were bullied more than the other children and often had to be sold because the white slaveholders’ wives were furious with being constantly reminded by these children of their husbands’ infidelity.
As best as can be known, Douglass was born in 1817 or 1818 during slavery and died in 1895. He lived through slavery, the Reconstruction Era, when the white government tried to give reparations to black people for the sins of slavery, and the ill-named Redemption Era when the white government catered to angry white citizens who resented the government helping black people and persuaded their elected officials to roll back reparations and replace Reconstruction with Jim Crow, an insidious reappearance of slavery under a different name.
The Sunken Place Feature #3: To be torn apart from your parents
Because Douglass was mere property, slavekeepers separated slave infants from their mothers as “a common custom” so no natural family bonds existed for these babies. As cruel as this practice was, it was even more cruel when slaveholders sold older children who were then separated from their parents after a familial bond had been established.
The Sunken Place Feature #4: To see your loved ones treated with abject cruelty by barbaric monsters
As a small child, Douglass witnessed many times his young beautiful Aunt Hester beaten by her slavemaster and he had to hear her terrifying screams. Mostly, he whipped her for his own whimsical pleasure but his most brutal beatings were for her falling in love with a young black man, which was forbidden because the slavemaster always “desired her presence.” He beat her to let her know she was his plaything, and this depraved cruelty left a permanent scar on the small child Frederick Douglass.
Additionally, as a child, Douglass witnessed many mothers who failed to wake up in time beaten by the cruel overseers in front of their children while the children begged the overseers to stop whipping their mothers but to no avail.
Witnessing this kind of human depravity with no guardrails put Douglass and his fellow slaves in the Sunken Place.
The Sunken Place Feature #5: The anguish and pain of slavery are so deep that words cannot describe them.
Douglass listened to his fellow slaves walk in the woods from the plantation to the Great House Farm and they would sing songs of sorrow that made him contemplate that the pain of slavery was so deep that the words he used to describe it were futile, that the only way to feel this pain, this Sunken Place if you will, was to listen to the “ineffable sadness” and “bitter anguish” in these songs his fellow slaves poured out in the woods.
Only by listening to these songs could Douglass get his “first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery.”
The Sunken Place Feature #6: Being forced to live the lie that your slavemasters made you happy because they were kind
Douglass observes that while the slaves suffered unspeakable agony, they had to pretend that they were happy and that their masters were kind. To encourage this facade, masters would send spies into the plantations to record any stirrings of discontent and these malcontents would be ripped from family and friends and sold to some place of horror even worse than the hell that they lived in.
The Sunken Place Feature #7: Knowing that the pathway from slavery to freedom is literacy, a condition that the slavemasters prohibited to prevent discontent in their slaves.
When the white caretaker Sophia Auld taught Douglass how to read and write, she was giving him the dignity proffered on any human being, yet her father Mr. Auld scolded her for “spoiling” the child with the gift of literacy, a gift that would make him think he was too good for slavery.
At this point, Douglass the small child understood that illiteracy was the slavemaster’s “great weapon” in helping “the white man’s power to enslave the black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.”
The slavemaster’s evil woke up Douglass to the fact that he needed to learn to read and write and whatever cost in order to save himself from the Sunken Place.
In the words of Douglass:
“What he dreaded, that I most desired. What he most loved, that I most hated. That which to him was a great evil, to be carefully shunned, was to me a great good, to be diligently sought; and the argument which he so warmly urged, against my learning to read, only served to inspire me with a desire and determination to learn. In learning to read, I owe almost as much to the bitter opposition of my master, as to the kindly aid of my mistress. I acknowledge the benefit of both.”
Without a teacher, Douglass gave food, usually his bread, to poor white children in exchange for their grammar and writing books; he found scraps of newspapers in the garbage and taught himself to read.
As an adult while living under the slavemaster Mr. Freeland, Douglass taught other slaves how to read and write and he saw how this gift of literacy gave his fellow slaves the longing to be free and at least one such slave did indeed escape slavery.
The Sunken Place Feature #8: Unable to remove the thought that you are enslaved, you regret your existence and wish you were dead.
Douglass was desperate to think of anything other than the horrid state of being a slave but the thought would not leave him and tormented him. He writes, “I often found myself regretting my own existence, and wishing myself dead; and but for the hope of being free, I have no doubt but that I should have killed myself, or done something for which I should have been killed.”
His only relief was hearing people talk about the need for the abolition of slavery.
The very word abolition captured Douglass’ imagination. He studied discarded newspapers to get a handle on what abolition meant and he learned that it meant the death of slavery.
He learned that an abolitionist was someone who championed the end of slavery through words, oratory, and deeds.
The Sunken Place Feature #9: To learn that the slavemasters who purported the strongest religious faith were the cruelest and most vicious
Douglass learned that while all slavemasters were cruel and evil, there was an extraordinary meanness attached to those who claimed religious piety; therefore, Douglass had to witness these pious slavemasters bloviating religious passages and larding kindness and generosity on their white guests during religious holidays while starving and beating the slaves with sadistic delight.
It was the religious slavemasters who would lacerate young slave women for up to five hours at a time.
One religious slavemaster knew a slave child had an injured hand from a childhood fire, yet beat her because she could not perform tasks in a timely manner.
The Sunken Place Feature #10: Being punished for looking intelligent
Many white people, especially slavemasters, had a special hatred and dislike for Douglass because his intelligence gave him a “city life” look that they found threatening. These masters said Douglass’s “uppity airs” had a “very pernicious effect” upon him and “ruined his good purpose” to be a slave. Douglass’ intelligence threatened his masters who gave him “severe whippings” just to keep him in line. Their objective was to “break” him and consign him to the Sunken Place; however, he resolved to be free and to free others thereby becoming the greatest American in recorded history.
The Sunken Place Feature #11: To be broken in body, soul, and spirit
Douglass observes that slavemaster Mr. Covey whipped him at least once a week and overworked and underslept him so badly that he was broken. “I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!”
He would watch ships sailing out of Chesapeake Bay and long to be a free man. These moments planted the seeds for his escape plans.
It should be noted that Mr. Covey beat Douglass and Douglass fought back and inflicted great pain on Covey and Covey’s assistant, and even though he was a slave for four more years, Douglass was never whipped again.
The Sunken Place Feature #12: Slavery is not merely physical bondage but a form of brainwashing
Douglass observes that slavery was a state of mind in which the slave had become content with his slavery and had lost the desire to be free. As Douglass writes:
“I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceases to be a man.”
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Notes As I Reread Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Douglass has no birthday as masters want to erase the history and significance of black people. Erasure is a theme and so is Otherization.
Douglass was born of a white man and a black woman, a slave. He was separated from his mother when he was an infant, a common practice.
White masters procreated with black women slaves for pleasure and profit, Douglass observes.
The white master will sell these slaves so he doesn’t see them being whipped, children of his own blood.
As a small child, Douglass witnessed merciless, sadistic whippings and beatings.
This includes the beating of his Aunt Hester, a beautiful 15-year-old who was forbidden to have relations with black men to save herself for the master presumably. She violated the rule and was beaten mercilessly in front of Douglass.
Douglass observed that hearing slaves sing songs about their lot in life would do more “to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery” than reading volumes of books on the subject. The “ineffable sadness” in these songs often brought Douglass to tears, even decades later when he wrote his autobiography.
Slaves were fearful for telling the truth so they usually spoke well of their master and said they were being treated well, so they wouldn’t be sold to some even more hellish circumstance. They learned to be silent or speak little.
By the time we get to Chapter 6, Douglass has moved to Baltimore where the seeds are planted for him to find freedom. He meets his new mistress who is relatively kind for a white person. Sophia Auld taught Douglass the alphabet when he was twelve until her husband forbade her to give him additional lessons.
Somehow, Douglass knew learning how to read would help bring him to freedom.
Riya Shankar writes in his essay “Frederick Douglass and the Power of Literacy”: “He was enticed by his master’s fervent opposition to learning, realizing that a slave becoming literate was liberation from his master.” He would no longer be at the mercy of his master. Literacy would give him power to make a deeper sense of the world and have the tools to articulate that deeper sense. Slave masters lived in fear that their slaves would become literate. Forced illiteracy was a tool to oppress their slaves.
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One of the things that Douglass hated about slave masters was the disrespect they afforded his grandmother who lived in isolation from her family because her children and grandchildren were sold and dispersed throughout the land so far from her that she never got to see them.
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Douglass’ intelligence and experience in the city made him a threat to his masters. They resented Douglass’ intelligent bearing; he could not play the role of a dumb complaint slave; he was a tall muscular handsome man who exuded intelligence when he walked into a room. Masters hated him.
What his masters didn’t know is that he hated them more than they hated him; he knew eventually he would kill one of them and that would result in his death, so he started planning his escape.
Making an escape was dangerous because slave masters hired slaves to do false flag operations enticing slaves to escape so that the masters could punish or execute the conspirators. A slave planning an escape had to be extra careful and trust no one.
The turning point in Douglass’ life is when he retaliated against his master Mr. Covey and Douglass thought he would be killed for his punishment. But Covey was too ashamed to report Douglass and Douglass lived, but he knew eventually another fight would ensue and he would be killed. He knew he’d have to plan his escape.
Another thing about the fight changed Douglass. He knew he could no longer submit as a slave. He would always fight back. In his mind, he was already free.
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The Cure for the Sunken Place: Ron Williams
In the movie Get Out, we see that Chris Washington has misgivings about going to Rose’s parents’ house, but he pushes his misgivings aside, he suppresses his instincts to be polite, and this habit of being nice and polite helps the Armitage trap Chris and put him in The Sunken Place.
Moreover, when he encounters several racist microaggressions at the Armitage home, he doesn’t fight back. To the contrary, he feels apologetic and awkward and blames himself for his predicament. This self-blame and internalizing racist microaggressions is a weapon that pushes him into The Sunken Place.
The movie would be a downer about helpless victimization and a crazy white racist cult, but the movie is not a downer and it offers a message of power and hope. Why? Because of the movie’s hero and cure for The Sunken Place, the great Ron Williams, played with expert panache by comedian Lil Rey Howery.
TSA agent Ron Williams is the movie’s hero in part because Williams adheres to a code that is conducive to dignity and survival. We can break down this code with the following Ron Williams characteristics:
- Ron never underestimates crazy white racist behavior. He’s seen what Jeffrey Dahmer did, as he says in the movie, so he’s prepared for anything.
- Ron never goes into a white environment blind. He’s of the belief that you need to do a recon or a surveillance of the situation because as far as Ron is concerned, a white environment is a malicious, hostile place for a lone black man.
- Ron believes in trusting your instincts. If you feel uncomfortable or startled, “Get the hell out.” Don’t be polite and suppress your feelings. Run. Run like your life depends on it.
- Ron believes in giving 100% of yourself to your friends. Loyalty is a must. Cover your friend’s back. At the end of the movie, when Chris asks Ron how he knew he needed him, Ron says, “Consider the situation handled.”
- Ron is proud of his authentic black identity. He apologizes to no one for who he is.
Contemplating and admiring Ron Williams is Jelani Greenidge in his essay “In Praise of the Get Out Brotherhood.”Links to an external site. Greenidge describes Ron Williams as a positive, heroic force in the black community for many reasons, not the least of which Ron Williams embraces his blackness, his black culture, his black language, and his black attitude. Ron Williams is proud of being black and apologizes to no one for who he is. This core authenticity in Ron Williams’ personality resonates with Jelani Greenidge. Describing himself as a black man, a Christian, and someone in an interracial marriage who finds it easy lose himself, Mr. Greenidge describes his challenge this way: “As a black man in an interracial marriage in the Pacific Northwest, I know what it’s like to feel so isolated that I’m in danger of losing my authentic sense of blackness.”
In contrast, Ron Williams is someone who never can lose his “authentic sense of blackness.” He has other virtuous qualities as well. As Greenidge observes in his essay:
But at his best, Rod is a brash truth teller with keen instincts and a fierce sense of loyalty. He keeps it 100, he’s good at his job, he looks out for his people, and he is unashamedly black. As a connoisseur of hip-hop, fried chicken and NBA basketball, I can also relate to Rod. So what I loved about watching their on-screen friendship was that it’s clear that Chris and Rod need each other. You could probably cast Howery and Kaluuya as these same characters in a buddy cop film or as best friends in a romcom, and it would probably still work, because Chris and Rod have what sports analysts often refer to as “chemistry,” a combination of skills, perspectives and attributes that can serve each other well in a friendship. Chris would probably be the one to help Rod write his wedding vows, and Rod would probably help Chris out of a jam.
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