Mixed Race Studies

Get Out Perfectly Captures the Terrifying Truth About White Women

Cosmopolitan
2017-02-28

Kendra James
New York, New York

Blumhouse Productions

There are many scary things about the movie, but scariest of all is its realistic depiction of racism.

Major spoilers ahead.

In Get Out, writer-director Jordan Peele takes 90 minutes to meditate on a lesson Kim Kardashian once spelled out for America via snake emojis and Taylor Swift: White women are not to be trusted.

I’ll let you decide how offended you want to be by that thesis while I spoil the hell out of this movie.

Get Out draws on the terrifying elements you might expect to find in your typical February horror movie release. There’s hypnotism, multiple jump-scares, a Deliverance-style redneck, and an illicit basement surgery where a doctor operates on people’s brains without their consent. As scary as any of these things are, they’re tropes we can all recognize as pure fiction, for the most part. They’re things we’re still more likely to run into in film, books, or television rather than in our everyday lives.

Unfortunately, the horrors of racism and white womanhood aren’t confined to imagination and pop culture. In using both realities in his movie, Peele brings Get Out to a higher level of horror, at least for any person of color in the audience. We’re all keenly aware of how possible it is…

…Jordan Peele is married to and expecting a child with a white woman, Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s Chelsea Peretti. He’s also biracial; his mother is white. But as he reaffirms in his latest Nerdist interview with Chris Hardwick, Peele sees himself — and experiences the world — as a black man. American history is littered with the bodies of black men jailed, beaten, and killed due to the simple words of white women. “A few months later… two negro boys, ages 8 and 9 were arrested, tried, and sent to reform school for allegedly kissing or allowing themselves to be kissed by a neighborhood playmate, a 7-year-old white girl!” Langston Hughes wrote in 1962. ..

Read the entire review here.

Hollywood’s Obsession With the Bottom Line Is Just Discrimination in Disguise

Cosmopolitan
2016-02-25

Stephanie Allain

Stephanie Allain has worked in Hollywood for more than 30 years, both in and out of the studio system. She’s produced award-winning films including Hustle & Flow, Peeples, Beyond the Lights, and Dear White People. Her next projects include Underground, a film about frat hazing at historically black colleges, for Netflix, and Crushed, a half-hour comedy for Lionsgate/Hulu inspired by the only black-owned family vineyard in Napa. She is also director of the L.A. Film Festival.

In 1990, I interviewed a young man to replace me as a script reader in the story department of Columbia Pictures. That man was 22-year-old John Singleton, and he couldn’t care less about the reader job. Instead, he pitched me his script about three young kids in South Central called Boyz N the Hood. When I got it from his agent, I closed the door to my tiny office and read it cover-to-cover. Up until then, I had been imitating my white mentors, Amy Pascal and Dawn Steel, culling the town for “commercial” scripts. Reading Boyz N the Hood reconnected me to my roots; it blew my mind wide open. There was an entire world of stories that had yet to be told, and as one of the few black women in Hollywood, I was determined to find them.

I was born in New Orleans in 1959 to Creole parents. Racism was insidious at that time in the South, so my father, a biochemist, and my mom, an educator, packed up our Impala in June 1965 and drove my sister and me to Los Angeles. We settled into a modest home near Wilshire Boulevard in the artistic community known as Miracle Mile, near the famous LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art). I think my father hoped we could escape racism by moving us out West and putting us in predominantly white schools, but that was a misguided wish: We reached L.A. just as the Watts rebellion broke out, exposing deep racial tensions in the city…

My colorblind bubble burst in fifth grade when the cute white boy who sat near me leaned across the aisle during a conversation about the Black Power movement and asked if I was a Negro. Somehow, I’d buried my shameful childhood memories of using a clothespin to narrow my nostrils. I’d forgotten how my cousins and I would compare skin color, the lighter ones wondering if we could “pass” like our grandmother was forced to do in her youth for survival…

Read the entire article here.