Post-Racial Lies and Fear of the Historical-Political Boomerang in Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad

Abstract

Scholars Marina Levina and Diem-My T. Bui argue that contemporary American monsters cluster around fears regarding rapid change. However, in some recent imaginings of the monstrous, the thing to fear most is not change but its absence. Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) are modern slave narratives undermining conceptions of a post-racial moment. Couching his narrative in the American Northeast, his neo-slave masters cast as twenty-first-century white liberals, Peele investigates our proximity to slavery and its traumatic legacy. Whitehead crafts a nineteenth-century narrative of chattel slavery, then embeds within it post-emancipation historical atrocities (including lynchings, eugenics, and the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment). In making the case that the legacy of slavery remains, Peele and Whitehead refute post-racial rhetoric, prophesying overt racism and racial oppression to come.