Horrifying Whiteness and Jordan Peele's Get Out

Abstract: Horrifying whiteness is a lens by which to read the paradox of white supremacists rendering Blackness as monstrous even as they terrorize Black people by executing physical and institutional attacks against them. As its name suggests, horrifying whiteness evokes the complex relationship between white supremacy and the horror genre calling attention to the violent white supremacist performances that are enacted on and off the big screen. In this article, I introduce my concept of horrifying whiteness which draws from previous Black scholarship on the gaze such as Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and bell hooks's Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992) but distinguishes itself by rendering white supremacy and the gaze as horrific via the horror genre. As a case in point, Jordan Peele's Get Out (2017) epitomizes horrifying whiteness through its depiction of the Armitages and their clients who mask themselves as good innocent white people while they privately abduct and sell/purchase Black bodies and exploit them. By reading Peele's Get Out through the lens of horrifying whiteness, I consider how horror frameworks not only challenge white denial and white innocence, but provide a lens through which Black vulnerability can perhaps be most clearly seen.