The Black Monster Identity Framework

Confronting Black stereotypes in American literature has been key to Black writers, including Patricia Hill Collins, Toni Morrison, and Omékongo Dibinga, among others. These writers use their works to interrogate and deconstruct dominant representations of Blackness as inferior or as the racialized “other.” Black horror writers like Tiffany D. Jackson and Jordan Peele have extended this deconstruction into literature and film, engaging with the cultural construction of the Black monster. Their works reject literary and cultural tropes that have historically portrayed Black monstrosity as evil and dangerous, instead reimagining the Black monster as a site of resistance. This article examines Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Tiffany D. Jackson’s The Weight of Blood as texts that reject these stereotypical tropes while repositioning the Black monster in three key ways: (1) to reclaim and subvert anti-Black stereotypes, (2) to function as a metaphor of survival, and (3) to redefine the Black monster as an avenger. This study examines how Jackson and Peele deploy monstrosity not as an intrinsic attribute of Blackness but as a narrative and symbolic response to racial violence and systemic oppression. The study introduces the Black Monster Identity (BMI), a Black horror framework that conceptualizes the development of the Black monster through three stages: Naive Stage, Transition Stage, and Creation Stage. The article concludes that Jackson and Peele deploy monstrosity as a means of empowerment, enabling their Black characters to emerge as avengers or (super)heroes who actively resist and dismantle racist systems by discovering their BMI.