The purpose of the Sunken Place is to facilitate the control over another ultimately. In the film, "Get Out," the mechanism of the Sunken Place was used to inhabit Black bodies. The key to entering the Sunken Place lies in the magic (hypnosis) of Missy Armitage, a white female psychiatrist. Once in the Sunken Place, Chris felt powerlessness as he lacked agency over his body and mind. Â In our contemporary society, a similar mechanism of control that robs individuals of their agency is a phenomenon known as mass incarceration. According to Joy Moses, a contributor for the Washington Post, the criminal justice system attempts to get US (Black America) to believe that it was our perceived failures in life, not systematic racism, that explains our so-called lazy, uneducated, lack of family/community ties, uncivilized, immoral behaviors. But of course, all of this is a lie. Black America is rich in culture, education, resilience, perseverance, values, and morality. After all, did we genocide Native Americas? Did we kidnap, murder, rape, and separate millions of people and brought them to "the land of the free" to become slaves? Like Chris' character, instead of allowing others to define who we are we out to be proud of what we have overcome as a people.Â
Mass Incarceration has many sociological consequences on communities of color as such reinforces racial hierarchy, where whites remain at the top. Now I won't bore you with the details as I am sure you know, that in the land of the free, The U.S. incarcerates more of its people than any other country in the world. However, the most prominent feature of this phenomena-mass incarceration-involves who are imprisoned. For example, Black men account for 40 percent of the prison population while only accounting for 6.5 percent of the U.S. population (13th). The Bureau of Justice reports the lifetime likelihood that a white man will be imprisoned is between 1 in 17 chances. The same report shows the likelihood of imprisonment for black men in his lifetime is 1 in 3 chances (13th). Thus, a system that unjustly criminalizes blacks gives way to racial hierarchy, where blacks are automatically placed at the bottom, while those who are white are not subjugated to unlawful persecution and are allowed to remain at the top. Justice is stratified in looking at the way various races are persecuted throughout society (O'Connor and 13th). Â Once in prison or the Sunken Place, inmates are powerless in the face of this monstrous system that devours black and brown bodies. This can be likened to a monster because inmates are unable to gain agency over their body as they are told what to do, how to do it, and where to go. Only a Monster could expand this amount of energy on such a pointless endeavor. Inmates are silenced, no matter how hard we fight and forgotten about in larger society which allows for the perpetuation of racial hierarchies. It is also monstrous because it creates a socially-dead. For example, the enslaved Africans in the U.S. not only submitted to the power of the colonizers but by doing so also acquiesced in their powerlessness which reinforced power dynamics in a society that viewed slaves as unequal to whites. This pacification, although could have spared enslaved individuals from immediate death served only to commute such a physical death (Jones 2016). With all said thus far, although Chris was able to escape the Sunken Place, there are currently millions of our brothers and sisters who are not so lucky. If the key to accessing the Sunken place lies in getting Black America to focus on our perceived failures, then we must be vigilant and unweaving in our commitment to not allow anyone in life to make us feel guilty for things not in our control.
