featured – Susan X Jane

90 Years Old: Straight, No Filler

The Oscars are rolling out the red carpet tonight, with all the stars celebrating the very best films Hollywood made this year. Amidst all the glittery chandelier earrings and piles of silk gowns are a host of political issues that are giving the films a run for the best drama award.

After years of silence and complicity, Hollywood’s not-so-secret culture of sexual harassment and predatory employment broke wide open with the takedown of Harvey Weinstein and the wave of predators washed out of Hollywood in his wake. While the initial euphoria of the movement has passed, Hollywood’s heaviest hitters, like Ashley Judd and Mira Sorvino, are behind the Times Up organization. Putting money where it matters, Times Up provides legal representation to victims of sexual assault that need it. While the black gowns at the golden globes were dramatic, the long-term effect of ongoing prosecution of predators across sectors has the potential to sweep in a new era of accountability. Now if we can just address the culture that makes the perpetrators, maybe we won’t see any more remakes of the same old Hollywood horror story.

OscarsSoWhite shed light on–der–a Hollywood so white that a director of color had never won in nearly 90 years, until last year’s win for Barry Jenkins for Moonlight. Now finally 90, Oscar has tipped its golden rod to diversity with the inclusion of directors Jordan Peele for Get Out and Guillermo Del Toro for the Shape of Water. From red carpet chatbot Michael Strahan to presenters and luminaries, there is a lot more color at the Oscars than there used to be. Sure rumors persist that older Oscar voters refused to even watch Get Out, never mind vote for it. Sure the Oscars continue to be mostly white, even amidst growing challenges from amazing artists like Dee Res, Ava DuVernay, and the aforementioned Jordan Peele. Let’s hope we can change a couple years with increased diversity into an inclusive new normal for Hollywood.

A year ago, the Oscars happened in the wake of Donald Trump’s inauguration and the chaos that followed. The tone was somber with lots of people pledging to resist and #nevertrump in their acceptance speeches. far from being overstated, the in the moment activism reflected the angsty zeitgeist of the year. It felt like Hollywood climbed out of the clouds to throw in for the resistance with the rest of the plebs. This year, not so much. Oscar producers are encouraging both attendees and the presenters to tone it down a little.

“I think people are getting burned out and sort of want a little break and a little focus on the movies themselves,” Rebecca Ford of The Hollywood Reporter told Inside Edition. “In general, ratings for this have been going down for television over the years, especially when things get too political, we do see that people tune out.”

While the resistance keeps chugging along, this year’s Oscars will be presented from La La land. Parkland Florida student activists won’t be in attendance. Host Kimmy Kimmel will keep his comedy less pointed political and more puns and schtick. This year’s Oscars will give viewers a break from the chaos that has only deepened since last year. Enjoy tonight, but don’t forget this isn’t normal.

The stories this year’s Oscars are celebrating ask us to believe in love, to recognize those that are different, to honor our communities, stand up to indifference and fight for what’s right. We need these stories to help us navigate a world that is anything but normal right now. When you are done swooning over the gowns, get ready for reentry from La La Land, but for tonight, pass the popcorn and root for everybody black.

The Revolution Will Not Be Commodified

The Superbowl is America’s highest secular holiday, a day where we celebrate the holy trinity of violence, fatty snacks, and great ads. This year a 30-second spot during the Superbowl ran for a cool 5 mil. Just like the teams on the field, advertisers have to go big or go home. Making a play for the woke heart of America, Ram trucks gave us this spot, voiced over by none other than Martin Luther King, Jr himself.

Yup, this ad went too far in pairing the eloquent and weighty words of a civil rights icon with a five thousand pound piece of environment-destroying metal with a lovely crew cab. The pairing is as good as strawberry milk and shrimp: the MLK voiceover is too meaningful to stuff its authenticity into a pickup truck and the truck ad does nothing to add to our understanding of the great leader. Lose-lose, just like the ~~Eagles~~ Patriots

The twitter machine is already chewing Dodge a new ass for the ad, and the King estate has confirmed that they had no part in lending the icon’s voice to the advertiser. By tomorrow, the tepid apology or some version of a mea culpa will slap back the controversy and we’ll move on to the next.

Advertisers are riding a razor-thin line when they leverage the political and social upheaval in the zeitgeist for their ads. Those who are in touch with their audience and talking with them instead of at them can really use the moment to show an authentic connection with their consumers. This T Mobile ad that also ran during the Superbowl tried to connect with consumers who care about a number of movements:

Brands are best when they jump into movements to get important messages out without hoeing out the message for the sake of the brand. In case you missed it Burger King did just that recently with their whopper neutrality ad:

You’ve got to get in the game if you want to win, so brands are bold to not shy away from what is happening in the world. But to actually win, you have to do your homework. Companies do themselves and the movements they purport to care about a disservice when they use social change as a costume they try on to sell soda or soap or trucks. Stripping the important events of our time and filling it with the same capitalist messages that have fed the inequality leading to this moment can leave audiences upset, brands tarnished and important social moments cheapened. Do better Ram, or stick with your Vikings.

It’s 2018: You Survived the Apocalypse

As a kid, I had problems–bullying, a little racism, typical teen drama. Sometimes when I would complain to my Dad he would impassively ruffle the pages of his newspaper and ask:

“Are you dead?”

Was he not listening to the blow by blow I just sobbed out? What does being dead have to do with anything? I would always spit out, “No,” with a pout. I knew what came next.

“Then you’re fine.” He would offer from behind his paper. Case closed.

What kind of bullshit was this? Could he not see the angst and pain my personal battles were causing me? Didn’t he care? I remember feeling that the simplicity of his answer was cold in light of the hard world outside our home. As with all good lessons, only later I came to see I had it backward: the world was cold and he was helping me create a hardness inside me to protect against its chill.

Later, in my room, gnashing my teeth in anger at the exchange, what would make me most mad is that I could not deny that he was right. No matter what anybody had said to me, no matter what emotional knots I tied myself up in over my battles, I was in fact, not dead, I was still here. In the end, when I got out of my feelings, I found myself still alive.

Over time this taught me no one’s taunts had the power to kill me, only to weaken me by pushing me off my mark, bending me out of integrity. Bullies were strongest when I let them push my buttons when I tried to go tit for tat. The fear and anger I felt as a result of their harassment only clouded my ability to respond. Acknowledging that I survived each challenge I faced helped me see I could not control the actions of other people but I could control myself. I could know that I was strong enough to face whatever was put in my way. It was not really about being fine, it was about knowing that I had the power and fortitude to keep going and keep moving, motivated by a deep faith that I would persist. I learned could thrive amongst difficulty. Knowing this gave me the control I needed to face my bullies with courage and composure.

Over time, I began to ask myself that same question in times of difficulty. When I thought I could not go on when the pain and misery of the world bent me out of integrity I would perform a quick gut check: am I dead? No? Then keep it pushing. I cannot control every monster but over time I learned I could control my own demons. This is the key to staying in the fight, to living to fight another day.

Sometimes the world seems too much to bear. I remember this time last year, seized with fear and uncertainty at the prospect of a Trump presidency, at a country set to explode. And then 2017 came. And we did blow up.

This year was a raging dumpster fire beginning to end. A year of Trump driving America right over a cliff–killing Obamacare and net neutrality, defunding science, tax breaks for the rich, the immigration ban, appointing unqualified judges and championing racism and sexism and classism as patriotic values. The country I love is on fire. The world is teetering on the brink of chaos. Our best hope seems to be a man with a rocket ship to Mars. The details of 2017 read like a list of signs of the apocalypse right out of several Hollywood movies.

And yet, we are not dead.

Even stranger, I feel wildly optimistic. The ground is razed and I’m in a mood to build. See, here’s a little secret I learned about the apocalypse. The end is never the end, only a new beginning. The word apocalypse comes from the Greek apo–un and kaluptein–to cover–to uncover, to reveal. An apocalypse isn’t an end, it’s an unveiling.

In the purest sense of the word, 2017 was a true apocalypse. America had long slumbered in a self-congratulatory slump, shoving a big foam we’re-number-one-finger in the world’s face while racism and sexism seethed unseen beneath the mainstream’s gaze. Globalization turned us into a nation of consumers, too proud to realize we were slipping behind in the knowledge economy. The untreated virus of white supremacy weakened our country for centuries and the only treatments rendered were to deny, destroy and disempower communities of color. Patriarchy kept one boot squarely on half the population, capitalism kept both boots on us all. With all that going on, we were too busy buying shit and numbing out to the pap of spoon-fed pop culture to notice.

Then came 2017: the rise of the alt-right. The blossoming of the new black civil rights movement. #Me Too. And Trump, Trump a pimple that exploded in all the ugliness beneath America’s skin. There are no more secrets here.

As a wise man once said, “if you don’t know, now you know…”

The scabby underbelly has revealed itself, disallowing us the ability to ignore the contradictions at the heart of our country, contradictions that threaten to tear us all apart: if we are the land of the free, why are we chained in debt? if this is the home of the brave, why have we ignored those who stand up to speak truth to power? if we are all created equal, then why are we so unequal? Can we ever be a more perfect union?

As painful as this year has been, we can see plainly what our country is. Gone are our rose-colored glasses, numbness turned to rage and fear. The trick now is to not let the emotions of these times cloud our ability to think clearly, act cooperatively and build towards a new vision, not just defend against the daily onslaught. As difficult as it is to be woke, it is the only way forward.

The apocalypse is an end only to the status quo. The upheaval is real, the chaos of old structures shaking to their core terrifying, but hush your fear and look for the opportunities to build. Channel your anger to weather the upheaval. The apocalypse ushers in a new time, the next paradigm. Don’t get lost in the distractions while new powerbrokers make new rules. The resistance is working, too, each of us in our own way. We have the knowledge, the technology, and–I know with every fiber of my being–the human compassion needed to build a better world, more perfect than our forefathers could imagine.

So on this first day of 2018, I offer you this gut check: if you are reading this, you’re not dead. You’re still here. And 2017 was a bitch, so that’s really saying something. Strap on your helmet. Like Elon Musk’s rockets, we have explosions at each stage, shedding a firey ball of flame across the sky, but I assure you we are ascending. As we jettison the lies we had come to depend on, we will be free to evolve past our imperfect past. As long as we don’t burn up in the process, we are entering the wider universe. We are transforming into something more.

Evil in Real Time

On the West Coast of Africa sits a gleaming white castle where over 300,000 Africans were tortured, raped and broken before being shipped to the Americas to work until they died. I anticipated I would be moved when I visited there, and even so was unprepared for the pulsating energy of this place, the feeling of a wound that would never heal. The outside was so bright it hurt your eyes, but the dark dungeons where slaves waited months to be shipped overseas still smelled of blood and death and human fear. The tiny window that afforded Africans their last view of home before enslavement–called the door of no return–was a heartbreakingly small sliver of Ghana’s riotous beauty beyond the iron bars.

What I remember most is a staircase. It was a steep wooden staircase that was just outside of the door to the women’s dungeon. At the top of the stairs a door through which you could directly access the Governer’s bedroom. The Governor of the castle would call down to have women sent up the stairs to be raped, and then returned to the dungeon below. The dungeon was cavern-like, windowless and low ceilinged where women were sometimes stacked like wood so the slavers could fit more in. The sweat and piss and shit and fear of women leaked into the soil floor, and prisoners suffered in the squalor. From this hell, a woman would have to climb the stairs. To be raped. To be raped and returned to a dungeon.

Standing at the bottom of the stairs I could see clearly how simple the evil at the heart of slavery was. All the narratives I had been taught in school that framed slavery as a complicated economic transaction, born of naive ignorance of the humanity of Africans, or better still a Christian desire to help the less fortunate Africans live right in Christ was bullshit. It simply was not possible for the people who held slaves to not know the brutal violence they were perpetrating–they lived in intimate quarters with the results of their evil actions. They could see and hear and smell the suffering of their victims. They chose to redefine it instead of recognizing it. Every day they chose to watch death blossom around them–they were the gardeners after all. It was not possible for the governor to open that door without hearing and smelling the suffering in the dungeon below. It was not possible for him to rape captive Africans without feeling the humanity of his victims as he crushed them beneath his body, then sent them broken and battered back down to be stacked awaiting death. This evil is pure and palpable.

The great travesties of history seem unbelievable in their sheer monstrosity. How could people of good conscious watch for hundreds of years as 400,000,000 Africans were enslaved and brutalized? How could 6,000,000 Jews be shipped to concentration camps while villagers watched trains just roll by? How could 400,000 Syrians be slaughtered by their own government while the world stood down to a dictator? We could add a handful, a dozen, a hundred events to this list where people watch brutal regimes destroy their own human brethren. There is no excusing these atrocities, no reason to wonder if slavery or genocide was anything other than just evil. It is difficult looking back to accept bystanders who bore witness were innocents, free from guilt for not intervening. This seems so clear when we look at the past, but markedly less clear in our own time.

For months now Ameria has been a swirling cauldron of chaos, racism and rape allegations, North Korea nuclear brinksmanship and Trump tweets; the tweets, the tweets. Hate crimes, gun sales, and taxes on the poor are all rising. Each day brings a new attack: news media, protestors and every minority group in a never-ending rotating succession. Each day there is a new topic worthy of debate at best, outrage at worst. You could set your news cycle to fresh controversy like setting a watch.

While Trump feeds the chaos machine, the GOP has been busy trying to dismantle what we commonly think of as our democratic country: trying to repeal health care with no replacement, stacking government agencies with people on record for wanting to abolish said agencies, looming tax reform sure to line the pockets of the rich while the poor and middle class suffer and a deep recession is all but inevitable, and of course, Russia.

Remember when people thought Trump might pivot? Do you recall people saying he needed time to learn, that Trump just didn’t know what he was doing because he was, after all, a businessman? Have you listened to the mind-bending juggernaut of deception Sarah Huckabee Sanders redefine reality every day, telling us that what we have seen and heard in the observable physical world did not happen? It time to call a thing a thing.

This administration is evil. Trump and the Senate and the House are willfully and intentionally dismantling our democracy. They know what they are doing. They know how bad it is, Watch them twitch and swallow as they speak lies into the camera. Watch them bend like contortionists twisting logic to support a child predator. See how they vote, quickly, without so much as a round of town halls in their districts for the constituents that this tax bill will affect most.

We are spending our time trying to figure out why. We put them on cable news panels to hear their point of view. We have magazine profiles to learn to sympathize with the Nazi next door, and the torch-wielding all-Americans willing to blame Mexicans rather that modernization for their unemployment. We are hearing them out while they are burning our country to the ground.

The blitz of bullshit is nearly impossible to ignore–how can the President of the United States use a racial slur in front of Native American vets without us responding? We have to talk about it, there has to be a response. At the same time, we are exhausted from responding to the barrage of crises. Instead, I recommend you pick your battles. You don’t have to respond to everything. Go hard on the issues, you care about most–dig deep to research, organize activities or events and write, share and speak about what you learn. Do the easy things you can do to support people when they need a signature, an attendee, a quick phone call or a share on an issue they’re staying up on. In this way, we can build a community that can collectively address a broad array of issues and leave ourselves enough room for serious self-care and recovery time.

Be mindful of speaking the truth and calling out lies and attempts to redefine what is real. The White House’s mania for deception seems bizarre in an era with so much fact-checking, but you may not be the target of their tall tales. Their dogged lies and their undermining of legitimate reporting leave Trump supporters in the Fox bubble completely misinformed and dangerous–both in the streets and at the polls. Thirty percent of the Republican voting electorate is basically immune to reason or information, ready to rock with even the craziest and cruelest policies. You may not be able to convince your drunk uncle at Christmas, but make sure you keep yourself convinced. These days the path to truth is sometimes hard to find; better leave a breadcrumb trail so you don’t get turned around.

But most difficult of all, do not negotiate with their terror. Resist the urge to make sense of any of it. Do not accept the narrative that this evil aimed at women and minorities and immigrants is merely a position that is equal, just different, from your own. This is not normal. The destruction brought on by regulation rollbacks, tax breaks for the rich, and possible military intervention in North Korea will be real. Real people will be hurt. People have already died as a result of this administration’s policies. Lasting damage will happen to our nation. Someday someone will stand in the broken castle we leave behind and will see so clearly that it was simply evil that that plunged our nation into chaos, nothing more or less. They will wonder about you and me, wonder how we felt watching this attack on our nation. They will wonder what we did.

I hope they will wonder, too, at the courage of our voice, at the thousand ways we resisted, we fought back, until we built a shining city on the hill of what could have been our darkest hour.

When White People Should Say N–

Once and for all I want to settle the controversy of White people using the n-word. There actually is a rule and it’s very, very simple:

Never.

NEVER.

Say it with me….white people should never say N*gga, n*gger, or any permutation of the word.

No, Bill, I mean you too:

This woman running for local office who called police about “N– outside drinking Hennessy? Heeeeelllllllllllllllllllll no, no matter what Eddie Murphy said.

How about stars who act like they’re cool with Black people? Nope.

But, wait, what about if you’re a teacher and you’re just trying to teach the youth about the N word with your old ass ideas saying the word over and over until you get checked? That’s on you, teach.

What if you have really good intentions, and you’re woke as fuck and you care about black people like you really love them and deeply care about black empowerment and you are committed to supporting black people in the struggle for justice? Like you dedicate your life to ending racism and you work hard every day to make the world more just and every once in a while in love and solidarity you want to refer to your black friends as my n–?

Trick question–if you’re really woke af, you know white people shouldn’t say the n-word.

So no matter what you’ve heard, no matter how extensive you think your hood pass is, no matter how noble your intentions or how great your cultural knowledge, if you are white the rule stands.

Never.

More than Miley: Disney Stars Ride Black Bodies to Adulthood

Blackness functions as a code to indicate a pop star experiencing a wild awakening. Blackness is there merely to represent the dark, seedy, undesirable side of America that is valuable only as a rumspringa for white American youth. They aren’t stealing your beauty or your swag–they grant you neither.

Miley Cyrus, trap queen, and twerk team champ released a new album this week along with a new persona: country Miley is back! Gone are the gold chains, grills and booty shorts. Instead, Miley is rocking country ruffles, cornsilk skin and white supremacy–guess White is in for summer!

To be clear, Miley has made several statements about this radical brand realignment, saying that she doesn’t listen to hip-hop because, basically, of people like her.

Wait, this is Miley, right?

Cue the outrage and the twitter dragging–well deserved. After copulating with hip hop to birth herself a new career, Miley was public-shaming her fling and claiming her roots didn’t include them-over-there black people. The think pieces started to look more closely at Miley, who she is and why she as an individual decided to ditch hip Hop for the white right. But like Dead Prez sang, it’s bigger than Hip Hop–or just Miley.

Young white pop stars have been using black culture and black bodies as a PR rite of passage into an adult career for years. It goes like this–say you’re a producer looking for the next big pop star. You want someone as palatable as possible so you can reach the widest audience. You want that squeaky clean all-American look, like a Mouseketeer look. You audition hundreds and hundreds of kids to find those magic ones that fit the image of American teen idol. They sing and dance their little feet off for you. For years. But they’re getting older, and their fans are getting older too. Hanah Montana’s fans now are wearing makeup, now dating. How can Miley be their idol if they are growing faster than her? How can Justin still be sexy if he’s just so wholesome? If you want that star you invested all that time and money in to keep paying dividends you have to shake them clear of their childhood image, sever them from their innocence and make them seem edgy enough to appeal to twenty-somethings who often love risk and seek danger. So you black them up, even the ones that are already brown or black–change their friends, change their look, change their sound, sometimes even darken their skin.

Now look at your favorite pop star, fans. They smoke weed, they sag their look, they hang out with those boys your racist dad told you not to hang out with. They’re getting wild. They’re growing up faster than you. They’re doing all the dangerous shit parents warn you about. You, fan, pay attention to ads or articles they appear in again. Their songs go back in your rotation.

But you, fan are maturing too. After a few years, that pop star making bad decisions is like a lot of your friends who aren’t doing too great–getting too high, acting stupid in public. You start to lose interest, again. Luckily the PR machine is here to remind you that that pop star is just like you. Ethnically cleansed and fresh from rehab with a mea culpa in hand, they’ready to be a mature star now, earning again for investors, and paying dividends to companies that have been banking on them since their Mouseketeer days.

It wasn’t that Miley, or Justin or Brittany or Christina were brilliant brand strategists–they were just the star shining on stage. The puppet master lurks above, pulling strings in a shadowy world driven by profit, data, and research as much as ideology. What many of theses stars have in common is their parent company: Disney. This PR path over black and brown bodies to the bank is part of the Magic Kingdom. Think about that–the company that so many parents trust their children’s hearts too has repeatedly used a calculated racist process to drive profit into their pockets and ideology into the hearts and minds of their customers.

Disney has long had a reputation for being racist. Walt Disney himself was a racist and many early Disney movies and cartoons were also racist. Song of the South and Dumbo have never been rereleased unlike many other titles in Disney’s catalog because they are so racist. Even Disney’s greatest hits are packed with stereotypical characters, and reinforce dominant ideology about race.

Look, I know you love Disney and here I come to shit all over your mouse parade. But the fact is that this is important. Disney has a mainline into American children, pumping not just Frozen song lyrics, but ideas about what–and who–is right and wrong. Disney shows, movies, and stars are vehicles for communicating ideas about how to be a good friend, good person, how to be a good girl or boy (how binary). Disney media shows us how to fall in love, how to fight for what’s right, and who the bad guys are.

It’s more than Miley. It’s that Walt Disney Company, one of America’s largest purveyor of ideology, has a long-standing widespread practice of using black bodies as the stand in for wildness, incivility, hypersexuality and violence. With America’s–and some of the world’s–children fed at the tit of Disney since birth, this equates to a silent symbolic war where one side has all the weapons. How can black people, already underrepresented in front of and behind the camera, battle a Kingdom complete with land, legal protection as a corporation and a legion of children ready to scream “Acuna Matata”?

The Miley Cyrus story has raised cries of cultural appropriation. Miley’s use of blackness, now discarded and demonized is a clear case for how cultural appropriation winds up hurting black people. But I believe when we move up the food chain, there is no personal fetishization of blackness, as much of the analysis suggests with Cyrus. Instead, blackness functions as a code to indicate a pop star experiencing a wild awakening. Blackness is there merely to represent the dark, seedy, undesirable side of America that is valuable only as a rumspringa for white American youth. They aren’t stealing your beauty or your swag–they grant you neither. Instead, they are stealing only their vision of you: raw animal aggression and untethered sexuality that they project onto black bodies so they can touch it, sell it, without taking any ownership of their own dark side.

For decades, from Annette and Frankie to Miley and Justin, Disney has used black bodies to flip child stars into adults. If you think they couldn’t have meant to–the old argument that their intentions were not racist–that still means that Disney has perpetrated years of cultural war on blackness without any concern for those represented or hurt. If you like your theory with a healthy dose of ~~paranoia~~ reality, maybe you believe Disney is intentionally vilifying blackness in the representational binary with their innocent white stars, then we agree on nothing less than symbolic genocide and ideologically armed racism delivered in brightly colored costumes.

Either way, Miley is just the tip of the cultural appropriation iceberg. Disney’s pattern of using blackness as a code shows that the ultimate result of cultural appropriation isn’t the inappropriate use of cornrows or coochie shorts but symbolic annihilation. Remember that the next time someone tells you to let cultural appropriation go.

[Love it? Hate it? Share it!]

Get Out: What it Really is (and Why it Really Matters)

(warning: major spoilers) Get Out, Jordan Peele’s hugely successful directorial debut is killing it–box office bonanza, critics’ favorite, thinkpiece heaven and somewhere, I promise you, some doctoral student is burning out an iMac writing a thesis about it. Main character Chris, ensnared in a modern day coon hunt with a twist, has stumbled on a mini market of black zombies. That’s right. This is a zombie movie.

Get Out trades on all sorts of movie tropes and motifs, as good filmmaking does, connecting us not only to a new story but also a new way of looking at ourselves. At its heart lies a surprisingly familiar undead corpse–the zombie. While the word zombie may give you visions of decomposing walkers or World War Z‘s running meat bags, Get Out returns us to the original body of the zombie story. The keys to the zombie story are mind control and bodily manipulation, a focus not on head shots but on enslavement. What’s more, looking at Get Out as a zombie movie helps audiences regain an empathetic lens to see black pain.

Like all good monsters, zombies, and zombie stories, are outsiders. They come from somewhere else–in the case of the zombie story, Africa. The origins of the idea of the zombie come from West and Central Africa. In West African spirituality, Orishas may ride devotees: possession not like the exorcist but more like catching the holy spirit, so one individual controlling another has spiritual precident. Possesion and control are also potential outcomes of rituals and spells. Powerful spiritual practitioners may control both living creatures and also unliving entities using the practices that are a small part of the religion of Vodun. The idea of using spiritual methods to control others’ bodies manifests in a complex and quite different way in Benin than the brain eaters clogging up the streets of Atlanta in the Walking Dead. Of course, the original story was dragged onto ships and enslaved along with millions of Africans, landing in Haiti. Like the Africans themselves, the story of what a zombie was and how we should feel about it was transformed under the crushing pressure of whiteness.

Imagine you are newly enslaved, shocked by the brutal middle passage and blistering in the sun of the new world being worked to death to grow sugar for the tables of the European elite. Thes people are going to beat you to work until you die as you have seen happen to so many around you . You are exhausted, malnourished, tortured, traumatized and caught between fighting to live and wanting to die. But you cannot die. Your body now belongs to the master, and death seems to be exclusivley controlled by the evil who weild power. It’s not a far leap to invoke the story of possession from home to create the Haitian zombie: this is no brain craving corpse, but a sentient being, enslaved and brutalized that needs to be freed, not stabbed in the head.

Enter Clarvius Narcissus. Poor Clarvius was just minding his own business when he was turned into a zombie using a powder of plant-based toxins and made to work on a sugar plantation for decades before eventually getting away and returning home, ragged and brain damaged but still Clarvius. His was not the only documented case of real life zombies, and there was even some evidence of a market for people drugged into compliance who could be forced to work for free. Again, the three keys are mind control, bodily manipulation and enslavement–in both real and imagined places.

Shifting to America’s silver screen, we find at first that the origins persist. White Zombie, a Bela Lugosi classic horror tale features a sugar plantation of enslaved blacks–and one white woman who of course does not belong there and must be saved. Even George A Romero, the father to the modern American zombie craze originally featured a black lead in Night of the Living Dead, maintaining the black gaze–the story was his.

The scary thing in these kinds of zombie movies was that it could happen to you. The empathy in the story lay not with the person who enslaved the zombie, or even those that may fear the zombie. The empathy in zombie stories is supposed to lay with the zombie. The enslaved Africans were the victim, not the monster, The trafficked laborers, like Clarvius, were the victim. Zombie movies were about seeing and sharing black pain. Until the Walking Dead.

The modern obsession with zombies in this century started with the cultural explosion that is the Walking Dead. The show ~~is excellent~~ has been excellent, and I count myself a fan. But unlike the zombie story which asks us to throw our lot in with the oppressed, The Walking Dead returns white people, free people and zombie haters to the center of the story. Rick, our flawed hero, reminds everyone that they need to stick together–so nice. But early seasons of the show find him repeatedly refusing to entertain any lasting interest in curing the walkers or even caring about them. Zombie myth reformed.

Get Out, though, reclaims the zombie genre. I know, I know- you probably didn’t think it was a zombie movie when you saw it. No wandering corpses, no hoards chasing down brains. But in the sweet sunshine of the Armitage plantation, the whites are commodifying black bodies, enslaving them using neurological means–toxic powders replaced with a scalpel. Catherine sends Chris to the Sunken Place, and like poor Narcissus, he is still conscious, but cannot overcome the spell he is under to take agency and get free. We see those that steal the brains are the real villains– different than Georgina, Andrew or Walter: the victims, their bodies ground up in a system that wants only their skills and not their souls. Mind control, bodily manipulation, enslavement to the extreme: zombies.

Understanding the creatures that we have been taught to fear is an important function of monster movies, especially when they are monster mash ups. Anne Rice and True Blood’s vampires, Penny Dreadfuls Frankenstein’s monster, even Twilight’s teams give us alternative readings of monster life, helping us to care about creatures living at the edges, to see that those that are hurt and broken are still deserving of love, perhaps even moreso. Returning the zombie to its rightful place as sympathetic victim, and reconnecting the zombie with its critique of whiteness makes Get Out not just a good movie, but an important movie. Diversifying Hollywood has to include pushing and challenging narratives to help us see what is too often rendered invisible.

Eyes play a major role in the film, from the key shot of Chris’s face seen in the movie to Chris’s photography to the planned transplant to “get your eyes, man”. The film asks us to see out through the eyes of the ensnared, to feel the terror of being trapped. Where the Walking Dead teaches us a thousand ways to kill a zombie, Get Out brings us to the sunken place where the zombies get stuck. We see Chris stabbed with the pain of his lost mother, falling, silenced. This is black pain separated from any of the usual stereotypical symbols of black pain like a crack pipe, gang flag or welfare check. This is a place where Chis suffers with his humanity intact, wanting not brains (he has plenty of those) but freedom.

What is it to fall into a zombie state and witness your own brutalization? Like having them love your body, but not you. Like watching others being rewarded for what you are penalized for. Like working yourself to death for minimum wage while being blocked from having any of the accouterments of your own labor and being blamed for wanting Jordans. Like having to choose when to speak up because you are just. so. fucking. tired. Like police videos. Like when there are so many police videos that you stop seeing them. Like protesters being pepper sprayed. Like watching the Clan take the White House.

Get Out makes black pain, as conceived of and acted by black people, visible. Far from the sunken place, the film gives voice here in the real world to the complex nuanced nature of racism in2017. It gives viewers of every race a story that requires them to empathize with black pain–which is too often abstracted to sell records, clothes or policies. The vast majority of movies and TV shows frame blackness as a problem to be quashed by white supremacy. The few films that cast blacks as innocent victims frequently require that whites still be the heroes. This film gives us neither slaves nor gangbangers and in their absence, we get a lens into a more authentic, relatable and human understanding of race and racism. If we are ever to evolve past systems of privilege we must first make them visible.

In the end, Chirs’s woke friend Rod is the only hero that can save him, and he’s got plenty of lessons for us to remember. If you wait on the state to save you, you’re in trouble but when the ensnared work together, they can get free. Rod’s concerns at first seem overblown, but he trusted his own understanding of racism even when others denied it. You’ve got to refuse to ignore evidence that supports what you know to be true. Rod gave a shit, and not just because he was dogsitting. Commitment to your brothers and sisters is key. We too, have to keep looking. It’s too easy to hear the clink of white supremacy and feel ourselves falling into the sunken place. Stay woke.