‘The Girl With All The Gifts’ (2016); ‘Get Out’ (2016) & ‘Us’ (2019)

Racial zombification and a zombie Pandora: young, gifted, and black.

‘‘The brutal truth is that the bulk of white people in America never had any interest in educating black people, except as this could serve white purposes. It is not the black child’s language that is in question, it is not his language that is despised: It is his experience. A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white. Black people have lost too many black children that way.’’

(James Baldwin, The New York Times, 29th July 1979)

In 2016 the film ‘Get Out’ — now on BBC iplayer — written and directed by Jordan Peele came out to both critical and popular acclaim. Ostensibly a horror film it was simultaneously a clever and serious critique of contemporary racism in America by focusing on white liberal America and its enthusiasm for Barrack Obama and the white establishment’s appropriation of black culture and black lives in general. It also provided a visual metaphor for the…