Zebra Zygotes

Spoiler alert: the macabre plot of “Get Out” involves some weird science that’s meant to create black bodies without blackness, black minds devoid of black consciousness. […] What the Armitages are creating is inwardly whitened black people—black people cut off from their history and their self-consciousness and, therefore, deprived of the power to rebel and to free themselves. Peele’s furious, comically precise lampooning targets two intersecting strains of racism. The Armitages’ friends see Chris’s blackness; they don’t see Chris, but they at least perceive that blackness as a fact, a phenomenon, albeit one that they have no idea how to deal with. The impeccably liberal Armitages, by contrast, are color-blind; in their cosmopolitan embrace, they affirm, with the best of intentions, that there’s no difference between blacks and whites, thus, in effect, denying that blackness—the distinctive black experience—is real.