How “Get Out” Disproves The Myth of Color-Blindness
**Caution: Spoilers Ahead**
It’s been merely a week since “GET OUT” opened in theaters, yet the amount and breadth of analysis around the film’s themes and characters continue to grow. There is indeed a whole lot to unpack from the many layers of Jordan Peele’s instant classic, making it a film best digested through multiple viewings and lots of post-conversations (preferably in safe places).
One character in particular, that of blind art dealer Jim Hudson (Stephen Root), speaks volumes about the idea of race neutrality or “color blindness” in America. In the film, we find Hudson sitting alone and a part from the rest of the White partygoers who’ve just finished “admiring” and fetishizing Chris’ blackness. Hudson’s perceived separation from the party and the comment he subsequently makes to Chris about the guests’ ignorance is meant to further distinguish his Whiteness from theirs. Not only is Hudson literally blind to Chris’ color, he is actually put off by the others’ obvious obsession with it, a fact that Chris is visibly relieved and comforted by.
Symbolically, this scene can be interpreted as a gesture to White people who try to set themselves apart from their more blatantly racist counterparts by saying things like “I don’t see color” or “but I have Black friends.” For that moment, Chris finds solace in the company of the one person at the party who cannot physically see his color and who doesn’t seem to be particularly interested by it — a fact which we later learn to be sinisterly untrue. Hudson also praises Chris’ great talent as a photographer, a subtle nod to the racial exceptionalism espoused by many White people, and which implies that Hudson’s literal and metaphorical blindness predisposes him to “seeing” beyond Chris’ color to the true content of his character. Wouldn’t MLK be proud?
Another example of this race color blindness occurs earlier in the film, when Chris asks Rose why she didn’t tell her parents that he is Black. Rose balks at the question and even suggests that mentioning Chris’ race in the first place would have made it a bigger deal than it ought to be. Her response is another manifestation of the “we’re all part of the same race: the human race” argument that some White people use to disprove accusations of racism, while shifting blame to the accuser for “always making everything about race.”
In his 2003 book Racism Without Race: Color-blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva argues that color blindness is merely a more subtle (but significantly more harmful) way for White people to brush issues of race under the rug in an attempt to unburden themselves from America’s original sin. Color-blindness allows Whites to point to racial advancements like school integration and affirmative action as proof that racism itself is obsolete, while completely ignoring the role that institutional racism plays in determining access to quality education and career outcomes. Further, through his introduction of the “Four Frames of Color-Blindness” Bonilla-Silva breaks down the various ways that claiming color-blindness allows White people to believe that racism simply isn’t the urgent social problem it once was, or that personal choice and responsibility, not race, is what sets people of different racial backgrounds a part.
These days the term “post-racial” has become the new and preferred euphemism for color-blindness. This prompted Bonilla-Silva to update his book with a new chapter dedicated entirely to President Obama’s election and the theory that America’s willingness to elect a Black man president reflected a permanent shift away from its racist heritage. Post-racialism also makes a cameo appearance in “GET OUT” when Rose tells Chris that her father would’ve voted Obama into a third term if he could. What she’s essentially assuring him is that if her family could entrust their now post-racial country to a Black man, surely they could trust their own daughter with one.
By the film’s end, however, we find that both Rose and Hudson doth protest too much. Having allowed himself to be lulled by colorblind Whiteness, Chris comes to the horrific realization that the two white people he’d been most comfortable with turned out to be both the orchestrator and benefactor of his own doomed fate. It’s hard not to see parallels between Chris’ betrayal by the post-racial Whites in the movie, and the real-life Whites who previously supported Obama only to turn around and vote for Trump.
In this way, “GET OUT” demonstrates the insidiousness of Black people and other people of color buying into the myth of a post-racial America, lest they be in for a devastating awakening. It also proves that, if all else fails, the best way to deal with colorblind White people is to run.
