{"id":52626,"date":"2017-03-19T15:12:09","date_gmt":"2017-03-19T15:12:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=52626"},"modified":"2017-03-19T22:11:53","modified_gmt":"2017-03-19T22:11:53","slug":"the-horror-of-smug-liberals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=52626","title":{"rendered":"The Horror of Smug Liberals"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Horror of Smug Liberals<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2017-03-18<\/p>\n

Frank Bruni<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>
\nBen Wiseman<\/small><\/p>\n

Oh, those smooth-talking, self-congratulating white liberals. Listen to them moon over Barack Obama<\/a>. Look at how widely they open their arms to a black visitor. Don\u2019t be duped. They\u2019re wolves in L. L. Bean<\/a> clothing. There\u2019s danger under the fleece.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a principal theme in the most surprising movie hit of the year so far, \u201cGet Out<\/a>,\u201d whose box office haul in America crossed the $100 million mark last weekend. Heck, that\u2019s the premise.<\/p>\n

The black protagonist heads with his white girlfriend from an apartment in the city to a house in the woods, where he\u2019s gushingly welcomed by her parents. But their retreat is no colorblind Walden<\/a>, not if you peek into the basement. I won\u2019t say what\u2019s down there. I don\u2019t want to spoil the fun or sully the chill.<\/p>\n

Besides, I\u2019m less fascinated by the movie\u2019s horrors than by its reception. The most ardent fans of \u201cGet Out,\u201d many of them millennials, don\u2019t just recommend it. They urge it, framing it as a \u201cwoke<\/a>\u201d tribe\u2019s message to the slumbering masses, a parable of the hypocrisy that white America harbors and the fear with which black Americans move through it…<\/p>\n

…But the movie\u2019s African-American writer and director, Jordan Peele<\/a>, conceived and began developing it well before the possibility of a Donald Trump<\/a> presidency came into focus. He wasn\u2019t responding to stark examples of racism like that infamous tweet last week in which Representative Steve King<\/a>, the Iowa<\/a> Republican, warned against trying to \u201crestore our civilization with somebody else\u2019s babies.\u201d …<\/p>\n

…\u201cGet Out\u201d is being categorized as a horror movie, though Peele prefers the neologism<\/a> \u201csocial thriller,\u201d and it\u2019s more eerie than violent, with superb pacing that critics are rightly praising. It\u2019s also a reminder that the best horror movies are intensely topical, putting a fantastical, grotesque spin on the tensions of their times…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Oh, those smooth-talking, self-congratulating white liberals. Listen to them moon over Barack Obama. Look at how widely they open their arms to a black visitor. Don\u2019t be duped. They\u2019re wolves in L. L. Bean clothing. There\u2019s danger under the fleece.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,8413,1196,8,23674,20],"tags":[10954,16433,2640,2327],"class_list":["post-52626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-communications","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-social-justice","category-usa","tag-frank-bruni","tag-jordan-peele","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52626"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52626\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52671,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52626\/revisions\/52671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}