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“The Sunken Place means we're marginalized. No matter how hard we scream, the system silences us.”
- Jordan Peele
Getting There Happens Quickly And Without You Even Noticing.
In the scene featuring the tear-filled image, a foe (Missy Armitage) has truly gotten into his Chris’ head. She is able to do so quickly and without Chris even noticing. Missy’s ability to hypnotize is a skill developed over a period of years. Racism and white supremacy have a similar skill, honed throughout the history of our country. If you’re not paying attention, they can quickly enter your head and mess with it.
Read it here.
The Sunken Place Paralyzes You, Stealing Your Sense Of Agency.
This is the most terrifying part. After entering the sunken place, Chris was paralyzed. He felt unable to escape the situation. Oppression sometimes does that to people. For some black folks, a life of financial hardship and/or incarceration can feel like inescapable destiny.
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What is the sunken place? Superficially, it’s a brainwashing technique. See, in “Get Out,” a young black man visits the family of his white girlfriend, experiencing an increasingly ominous series of microaggressions, until the reveal comes: He has been lured there to be kidnapped, sold into a form of slavery, and lobotomized so that his body can be hijacked by the white person who purchased him. Part of what makes it possible is a kind of hypnosis, which separates the consciousness of the victim from control of the body.
It’s particularly horrifying because it works as a metaphor for not only the literal history of slavery, but for cultural appropriation and the use of social niceties to enforce social hierarchies. But as Peele explained Thursday on Twitter, “the sunken place” has bigger implications.
“We’re all in the Sunken Place” he tweeted.
Soon after, he elaborated on what that means. “[W]e’re marginalized. No matter how hard we scream, the system silences us.”
Read it here.
Marginalized minorities who used to look to DKOS to provide leadership on racial issues have just been told to look elsewhere.