This essay argues that Jordan Peele's Get Out and Us expose the "post racial lie" of contemporary America by dramatizing what the paper terms the racial uncanny—the unsettling return of racial truths that dominant culture insists are buried. In Get Out, the uncanny emerges through whites "acting black" and blacks "acting white," revealing how apparent acceptance masks appropriation and how assimilation conceals new forms of enslavement. In Us, the affluent Wilson family confronts their Tethered doubles, embodiments of the racial and economic underclass whose suffering underwrites middle class comfort. Drawing on theorists of the uncanny and on Peele's own commentary, the essay shows how both films disturb the boundaries between self and other, privilege and oppression, surface harmony and submerged violence. Ultimately, Peele's work insists that seeing these buried racial realities—getting "woke"—is essential to survival and ethical responsibility.
Douglas Keesey (Tue,) studied this question.