Everyone is very concerned of late with how to be a “white ally.” As though it’s a term that could be put on a t-shirt or hat to ensure one is advertising that they’re part of the future and not the past. That they’re on to the latest trend and they know how to make it work for their “brand.” The fast-spreading rhetoric of the internet has suddenly made companies and ordinarily aloof white folk take notice (though no one will ever top Ben & Jerry’s scathing damnation, “What happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis is the fruit borne of toxic seeds planted on the shores of our country in Jamestown in 1619, when the first enslaved men and women arrived on this continent. Floyd is the latest in a long list of names that stretches back to that time and that shore”). While there can be no denying that the well-intentioned exist among many protesters, there can also be no ignoring the fact that Earth hasn’t exactly shook itself of unscrupulous people just because some have rallied together to declare, “No justice, no peace.”
There are undoubtedly a great many white people at this moment who just want to come across as being “on the right side” of things, as it is said, so they can quickly get back to posting on their social media as usual (this goes double for white “influencers”). And while that might add more needed members to the movement, it must be said that there is such a thing as intention playing a part in the outcome of something. If a large percentage of people’s intentions stem from a place of self-servingness and concern for image, the possibility for the endurance of the protests and their effects are bound to lose steam eventually when the next scandalizing news item comes along.
What’s more, while it is the white supremacist alt-right (and the cops thereof) that is presently being placed on the funeral pyre, it bears remembering that the middle class white liberals are the insidious villains in Jordan Peele’s 2017 pièce de résistance, Get Out. Lanre Bakare, a culture editor and writer for The Guardian, perhaps put it best when he wrote of the film upon its release, “The villains here aren’t southern rednecks or neo-Nazi skinheads, or the so-called ‘alt-right’. They’re middle class white liberals. The kind of people who read this website. The kind of people who shop at Trader Joe’s, donate to the ACLU and would have voted for Obama a third time if they could. The thing Get Out does so well–and the thing that will rankle with some viewers–is to show how, however unintentionally, these same people can make life so hard and uncomfortable for black people. It exposes a liberal ignorance and hubris that has been allowed to fester. It’s an attitude, an arrogance which in the film leads to a horrific final solution, but in reality leads to a complacency that is just as dangerous.”
Peele’s use of the “sunken place” that protagonist Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) finds himself forced into by Rose’s (Allison Williams) mother, Missy (Catherine Keener), is a disturbing metaphor for the reality black people find themselves in every day–one that white people can’t fathom despite being the reason they’re stuck in that place. “The real thing at hand here is slavery,” Peele noted of the allegory. Jim Hudson (Stephen Root), the only “white ally”–there goes that term again–in the film is technically the least racist because of his oblivion to and detachment from the situation. Yet, as Peele stated, he “still plays a part in the system of racism. And the way it manifests in that movie is, yeah, a guy who believes that the eye of this better artist, this black artist, is what’s separating him from being a success or a failure. Which also, to me, is a commentary on a sentiment I was hearing a lot during the Obama era, this whole mythology of a [purported] advantage of being black in this culture.”
The film’s deeper exploration of “racism through fascination” as it is phrased in the same Rolling Stone interview is the phenomenon that seems to be taking shape at the moment, with frank conversations about such a topic remaining tenuous in a climate where white people still don’t want to look at themselves in too harsh a light (least of all when examining how their behavior is presently being influenced right now by media across all channels). For Get Out digs that knife in deeply “enough so that generations of white hipsters should squirm.” Because, yes, there is a fetishized sort of “chicness” to hiring black people, feeling “part of the culture” and getting behind black causes that self-soothe Caucasians long enough before they get back to their regularly scheduled privilege. As to the point of engaging in the protests, to a white person, how could their intentions not be as “pure” as the milk in Rose’s glass next to her infamous bowl of Fruit Loops?
