“Get Out” and the Death of White Racial Innocence

As “Get Out” climbs above the hundred-million-dollar mark at the box office and starts to open around the world, I keep thinking of my original viewing of the film, in downtown Brooklyn, where I could count all the white people in the large movie theatre on one hand. When Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya), the good-looking, amiable black protagonist of the movie, stabs a white woman to death, impales a preppy white man with the antlers of a steer, and watches idly as a white woman is gunned down on the road, the black audience cheered and burst into gales of howling laughter. Jordan Peele’s début film was already on its way to becoming a social phenomenon, one-upping his “Key & Peele” TV antics and speaking uniquely to the country’s sour racial mood. While black and brown youth flock to megaplexes to see “Get Out,” the blue-state bourgeoisie flow to art houses to see Raoul Peck’s documentary “I Am Not Your Negro,” which channels the writing of James Baldwin. Predictably, the two films are rarely playing in the same venue. But one cannot help but compare the zany satiric bite of “Get Out” with the resonant intelligence of Baldwin in “I Am Not Your Negro.” Both of these films, in their different ways, mock and cheer the death of white racial innocence.