About That Deer In Get Out

Daniel Johnson
Jul 24, 2017 · 4 min read

Son of Baldwin is under attack from white folks for following their lead, and I am completely unsurprised. They seem to think that we owe them solidarity, that they are entitled to our labor, our concern, and our righteous indignation now that the victim of state sponsored violence is white. They seem to think that now that one of their own is a victim of the police brutality which we have been warning about for decades, they should get all of our sympathy, all of our activism and all of our protests. They are illustrating exactly what one of Jordan Peele’s opening scenes in Get Out depicts with a masterful eye; the callousness of whiteness. In this scene, Chris and his white girlfriend are going to her parents house and she hits a deer. She does not move, nor offer any compassion for the deer, but Chris does. The damage, the violence she does, she inflicts on the deer has no effect on her and it does not move her in the least. Chris is moved, because he understands what it’s like to be the deer, what it’s like to be treated as though he and his life are disposable. This is the history of America in a sentence, the entirety of American life on the wrong side of the line in a scene.

White people collectively have been inflicting harm on Black people in America for nearly as long as it has been a country, and definitely as long as they have been in America with us. Scratch that, as long as they saw fit to take us from the shores of West Africa and force us into ships, to make a traumatic journey across the Atlantic Ocean that killed many pieces of our family trees. Furthermore, once we arrived, they almost immediately separated families and tirelessly worked to ensure that the social order worked in their favor, and left us to navigate these compounding violences. In a word, they used the full force and weight of the law to slam us with blunt force trauma, trauma which we are still now searching for ways to overcome and survive. Chris’s girlfriend is the epitome of the white consciousness as they generally do not care who or how badly they hurt, so long as they are insulated from the pain that they introduce. So long as they don’t have to see their pain reflected back on them, so long as they don’t have to actually deal with the recompense for the violence that they have visited upon us. Yet, when they get but a small taste of the medicine they constantly dish out, their first instinct is to recoil at the bitterness. Oh no, Sharon, you served us this dish first and now that we use your recipe, now you have a problem with how it tastes. Perhaps if when the litany of Black names and Black bodies were hoisted up and lynched by the State, you had been bothered enough to raise your voice, or even to walk over and check on us, you may indeed have some allies in your fight. As it is, you expect us to shrug off centuries of your violence, your apathy, your malevolence, your complicity in our dying to sound an alarm that now it’s a problem. You have sat in your vehicles, you have watched us rally, and protest, and go check on the bodies you left laying in the street, the bodies you left twisting and swaying in the wind whilst you were completely unconcerned with whether we were okay. Now that your chickens have come home to roost, you want us to roll up our sleeves and go to work and now you want to do something about police brutality and standards of conduct? Now you want to have the police prosecuted since the victim this time is a white woman and the officer who shot her is a Somali immigrant? You’ll have to excuse us if we aren’t exactly in a rush to jump out of our cars and go check on that deer this time, we remember all the deer you ran down, all the deer you watched die only to sit on your hands and stifle your voices and show no remorse.

We really just need the white folks who are so pressed about this instance to go back and look at Oscar Grant, Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Mike Brown, Eric Garner and tell us what the difference is between those cases and this one; what the difference is between Rekia Boyd, Sandra Bland, Natasha McKenna, Charleena Lyles and this white woman. Let me save you the trouble, the difference is only that this woman is white and the officer who killed her is Black. The difference is that this woman did not have to prove her humanity in the media, she was immediately proclaimed innocent. The difference is that the violence of whiteness fiercely protects this white woman even as it demonized these Black victims of state sponsored violence.

You’ll have to excuse us if we want to sit this one out, because it is simply the violence of whiteness coming home to claim its own and we want to see if you’re going to go check on what you created. If you’re going to fix your problem or if you’re going to wait on us to fix it for you. We’ve been watching deer die for four hundred and fifty years, it’s time you understood what that feels like.

Daniel Johnson

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I write things, sometimes they go viral, sometimes they sit in obscurity, and I'm okay with either. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danieljohnson?utm_medium=so

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