Director and writer Jordan Peele’s horror-comedy Get Out, about a black man’s nightmarish weekend meeting his white girlfriend’s family for the first time, is one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful movies of the year. People have raved about the thought provoking social commentary, and it has opened a mainstream conversation about remaining racial fears and experiences that exist in American society. However, in an interview with radio station, Hot 97, veteran American actor Samuel L. Jackson started a conversation many were not thinking about, and many others did not want to think about. “I tend to wonder what Get Out would have been with an American brother who really understands that”, he stated about the casting
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First, we need to understand how identity and identity formation can be understood in general. Linda Alcoff (2006) provides this in her “Real Identities” chapter of Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. The primary tenet underpinning her understanding of identity is the need for it to be contextualized and historicized (Alcoff 2006). She argues that social identities are fundamental to one’s experience of the world, identifying two main aspects: 1) public identity, how the self is systematically perceived and classified by others within the networks of communities lived in and 2) lived subjectivity, who we believe ourselves to be, how we experience being ourselves, and the range of activities that make up our “agency” (Alcoff 2006). These aspects interact through the hermeneutic idea of “interpretive horizons”, the spaces from which one looks out to understand and make meaning of the world performed in a particular place and time, by a particular person whose individual experiences have a formative influence (Alcoff 2006). The horizon perspective consists of an individual’s background assumptions, social location within the societal structure, and personal experiences which situate their interpretations through cultural, historical, and political contexts (Alcoff …show more content…
They begin by tracking the origins of race as a concept during the transatlantic slave trade. Race and the interpretation of racial differences were used to uphold and explain the normative reasons for why some were “free” and afforded certain rights while others were enslaved, until eventually it evolved as a concrete social concept that determined all social relations (Omi & Winant 2014). Racial meanings vary over time and between different societies, but in America color lines have always been strictly defined and enforces: white is “pure” and any mixture is considered “nonwhite” (Omi & Winant 2014). Given the embedded nature of race, racial identity formation is the central axis of social relations in the US, determined by how social, economic, and political forces shape the content, importance, and meaning of racial categories (Omi & Winant
First, we need to understand how identity and identity formation can be understood in general. Linda Alcoff (2006) provides this in her “Real Identities” chapter of Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. The primary tenet underpinning her understanding of identity is the need for it to be contextualized and historicized (Alcoff 2006). She argues that social identities are fundamental to one’s experience of the world, identifying two main aspects: 1) public identity, how the self is systematically perceived and classified by others within the networks of communities lived in and 2) lived subjectivity, who we believe ourselves to be, how we experience being ourselves, and the range of activities that make up our “agency” (Alcoff 2006). These aspects interact through the hermeneutic idea of “interpretive horizons”, the spaces from which one looks out to understand and make meaning of the world performed in a particular place and time, by a particular person whose individual experiences have a formative influence (Alcoff 2006). The horizon perspective consists of an individual’s background assumptions, social location within the societal structure, and personal experiences which situate their interpretations through cultural, historical, and political contexts (Alcoff …show more content…
They begin by tracking the origins of race as a concept during the transatlantic slave trade. Race and the interpretation of racial differences were used to uphold and explain the normative reasons for why some were “free” and afforded certain rights while others were enslaved, until eventually it evolved as a concrete social concept that determined all social relations (Omi & Winant 2014). Racial meanings vary over time and between different societies, but in America color lines have always been strictly defined and enforces: white is “pure” and any mixture is considered “nonwhite” (Omi & Winant 2014). Given the embedded nature of race, racial identity formation is the central axis of social relations in the US, determined by how social, economic, and political forces shape the content, importance, and meaning of racial categories (Omi & Winant