Black Exploitation in “Letter to My Son” and Get Out
The United States is a country built upon generations of racial exploitation that has caused untold levels of violence and destruction on vulnerable communities. Ta-Nehisi Coates addresses this history in his work, “Letter to My Son”, by offering a glimpse into the lives of his community and the damage that racial exploitation has caused to it. Similarly, director Jordan Peele explores this theme through the film-within-a-film of his horror movie, Get Out, in which he provides a satirical take on an exceptionally brutal form of racial exploitation: a complete theft of the body and destruction of the mind. Both works address the reality of systemic Black exploitation and how its effects are trivialized by the dominant culture of the United States. However, while Coates employs extended metaphors and imagery to address the effects of exploitation on his community and cultural history, Get Out utilizes juxtaposition in mise-en-scene, lighting, and framing throughout its film-within-a-film to create a satirical commentary on Black exploitation in the modern day.
One of the most prominent themes that Peele explores in his film is the physical and emotional violence of exploitation on each individual affected by it. Coates addresses this violence in his letter where he states, “Racism is a visceral experience…the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body”. Coates goes on to describe the violence of racism as, “dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth”. His usage of the words “rips”, “cracks”, and “breaks” invokes a sense of horror and destruction that is reminiscent of sadistic torture. This use of imagery allows audiences to fully grasp the level of brutality that racism exerts on the Black body. Coates’s usage of the phrase “dislodges brains” is echoed within the film-within-a-film in Get Out, where Armitage seeks not only to exploit Chris’s body but to physically and violently remove his identity and sense of self to appease the vanity of his white community. The shot-reverse-shot between Roman Armitage walking across an open expanse of greenery and Chris bound to a chair in his basement works to convey the violent physicality of Chris’s position as well as the removal of his personal identity. He is unable to move, breathe fresh air, or communicate with the man; reduced to a body to be utilized on the whims of those in power.
Contrasting this emphasis on physicality, Coates challenges the very concept of whiteness throughout his paper by highlighting how white individuals are often perceived as “neutral” in American society while Black Americans are painfully aware of the constant presence of their race. He does this in part by describing European Americans as “those Americans who believe that they are white,” or “the people who wanted to be white,” while conversely using the phrase “Black body” 42 times in his 20-page letter. Shannon Sun theorizes that this is done to demonstrate that, “whiteness promises power while blackness represents its very deprivation.” For white westerners, race exists as an ideology to which they may unsubscribe in this age of post-racialism. In contrast, Black westerners must remain aware of their body and the racialized violence that may be directed towards it. In this way, the Black body itself becomes an inescapable physical presence, defined by a history of violence and oppression.
This theme is embodied by Peele’s creation of Get Out as a subversion of the horror genre. Horror films are famous for their use of dramatic irony to create tension and fear. Ryan Poll suggests that this trope works in mainstream horror films because, “White people fundamentally imagine the world without horror.” In contrast, he states that for Black Americans, “horror is not a genre, but a structuring paradigm” (Poll 2). This trope sparked the mainstream joke that only white people could be in horror movies because Black people would simply “get out” of the situation at the first sign of danger. Peele’s film aligns far more with Poll’s interpretation than the mainstream, with the opening scene depicting a quiet suburban street that would seem harmless to many yet provokes an immediate sense of danger in Andre as well as the audience. Throughout the film, Peele continues to build discomfort and tension through microaggressions and uncertainty towards the characters’ intentions. This is done to demonstrate his greatest message in the film: for Black people in America, horror is the default; so much so that Chris is able to rationalize his continued stay at the Armitage house even after Andre’s warning. This is made even clearer by the warning itself; Andre explicitly tells Chris to “get out of here,” yet Chris is so used to being in situations of racial violence and discomfort that he allows himself to accept the Armitages’ excuses and ignore his warning (Peele). The discomfort evoked by this portrayal of white America demonstrates the film's power as a tool for social commentary, compelling the audience to confront the most damaging aspects of racial inequality and exploitation.
The works of Peele and Coates also demonstrate how racial violence and exploitation is worsened by its trivialization from perpetrators who live in ignorance of its reality. Coates expresses this ignorance in the quote, “There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy”. The use of the word “destroyers” represents the ways in which the impact of a person’s actions is more glaring than their intent. Coates demonstrates that understanding the ignorance and misguided intentions of someone who causes harm does not mean that we should shy away from the reality of that harm and the effects that it has on its victims. “Heritage” and “legacy” are typically words associated with great accomplishments and nobility that hold value in their preservation. Through this diction, Coates conveys that our society upholds a misguided idolization of our history; a history that we should not take pride in or seek to preserve. Peele illustrates this misguided ignorance through the juxtaposition of Armitage and Chris. Armitage is portrayed in the video as serene and smiling while Chris sits in bondage with his face contorted in horror. This contrast between the expressions of oppressor and oppressed draws attention to Armitage’s willful ignorance of his own cruelty. The mise-en-scene of the video’s commercial style and bright colors also helps to illustrate how Armitage has depersonalized his own actions and separated himself from his victims. Armitage is then shown in a zoom shot that highlights the sinister nature of his message while his continued smiling illustrates his lack of awareness towards this cruelty. This juxtaposition conveys a sense of futility towards the idea of Black people fighting their exploitation and helps to create an understanding of how helpless an individual is when battling a system that is built to work against them.
However, the extent of this trivialization cannot simply be reduced to naivety. The works of Coates and Peele also draw attention to the phenomenon of racial gaslighting and the harm it causes to Black communities through their portrayal of “hope”. In “Letter to My Son”, the white news host displays this hope as “a widely shared picture of a 12-year-old black boy tearfully hugging a white police officer” (Coates). This moment is especially jarring in conjunction with Coates’s reference to the murder of Tamir Rice, “a 12-year-old child whom [the police] were oath-bound to protect”. The description of both Tamir Rice and the boy in the picture as “a 12-year-old" creates a contrast between the brutal reality of Black communities and the false “hope” of the white public. This is a common theme in racial gaslighting: the sanitization of Black exploitation for the comfort of its perpetrators. Roman Armitage’s character and his view of the Coagula procedure reflects this idea of weaponized hope. In the opening shot of the scene, the camera pans from a bright sunrise to Roman Armitage, framed with his face toward the sunrise and his back turned to the camera. This framing demonstrates his complete disregard for the suffering of those he victimizes in favor of his hope for a new day in scientific advancement. Meanwhile, Chris is portrayed in low-key lighting and dark shadows, unable to witness the sunrise that Armitage praises. Armitage covets Chris’s body only so far as it is exploited to achieve his own goals, without respect to his worth as an individual. Coates expands on this idea and how it is mirrored in the American mindset through his quote, “And our inferior bodies could not possibly be accorded the same respect as those that built the West. Would it not be better, then, if our bodies were civilized, improved, and put to some legitimate Christian use?” Historically, the United States has employed these concepts of civilization and Christianity to justify its most egregious institutions of racial violence. Coates’s reference to these concepts demonstrates the stagnation of our nation’s cultural mindset in the wake of these tragedies, allowing for the continued rationalization of modern Black exploitation.
Coates employs several literary devices throughout his work to better convey the reality of life as a Black man in a society built for the benefit of white families. One noteworthy instance of this is the extended metaphor of the “Dream.” Coates describes the dream as, “perfect houses with nice lawns,” along with many other details that invoke an image of American suburbia and the nuclear family. The framing of the Armitage family at the end of the video parallels this image of the dream. The children, parents, and grandparents stand smiling as a family unit framed in the foreground with a large house and perfectly tended lawn in the background. Coates states that experiencing the dream is to, “fold my country over my head like a blanket.” This use of simile creates an image of a child hiding under a blanket to protect them from monsters under the bed, evoking a sense of innocent naivety towards the harsh realities of the world. Coates goes on to describe the blanket as, “bedding made from our bodies,” demonstrating that this illusion of safety and comfort for the dominant culture is only obtained through the exploitation of those who suffered for its creation. Peele literalizes this metaphor through symbolism within Get Out’s mise-en-scene. As Armitage introduces the Coagula procedure, the shot cuts from him to a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis. This shot compares Armitage to the butterfly, reborn stronger and better from his creation. Conversely, Chris is represented by the dead deer that hangs above the TV. The shot-reverse-shot cuts from Chris to the deer head and back, mirroring Armitage and the butterfly. Both Chris and the deer are innocents who are hunted and trapped, their lives exploited for the whims of the family living above them. Similar to the way in which Coates’s blanket conceals the reality of Black exploitation, Chris and the deer are hidden away in a windowless basement surrounded by low-key lighting and deep shadows, their suffering literally kept from the light of day.
The works of both Peele and Coates utilize formal literary and film tools to express their unique perspectives on racial exploitation and its effects on vulnerable groups. While “Letter to My Son” places an emphasis on culture, history, and shared communal experiences, Get Out chooses to focus on the experience of an individual trapped under the weight of this system of exploitation in order to reflect the wider reality. Coates’ abstract metaphors are literalized through Peele’s use of mise-en-scene and complex filming techniques. In this way, the two works are able to complement and complete each other to convey the nuances of modern Black exploitation.
References
Coates,Tah-Nehisi.”Letter to My Son”, The Atlantic. July 4, 2015. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/tanehisi-coates-between-the…
Peele, Jordan. Get Out. Universal Pictures, 2017.
Poll, Ryan. “Can One ‘Get Out?’ The Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 51, no. 2, 2018, pp. 69–102. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/45151156. Accessed 21 Nov. 2023.
Guerrero, Lisa. “Can I Live? Contemporary Black Satire and the State of Postmodern Double Consciousness.” Studies in American Humor, vol. 2, no. 2, 2016, pp. 266–79. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5325/studamerhumor.2.2.0266. Accessed 21 Nov. 2023.
Sun, S. (2019). Embodying Blackness: Vocabulary of Race in Coates’s “Letter to My Son”. The Morningside Review, 15. Retrieved from https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/TMR/article/view/3454