Black No More and Get Out — Chasing Otherness

Noah Murray

Ms. Harris

ENGL 2017-6847

May 2, 2022

Black No More and Get Out — Chasing Otherness

    At first glance, Black No More and Get Out are opposites: the former, a satirical comedy in which Black Americans surgically turn their skin white; the latter, a horror-thriller in which a cult of (mostly) White people kidnaps Black people and steals their bodies via brain transplant. But these stories, nearly ninety years apart, share key themes, and have important things to say on the matter of ‘true’ Blackness and Whiteness.

    One important way to distinguish the stance of each work is the way in which characters ‘switch’ their race. In Black No More, the surgeon Dr. Junius Crookman pseudosciences his way into permanently lightening the skin and changing the features of his patients. Crookman says, “In three days the Negro becomes to all appearances a Caucasian,” (13) appearance being a key word. Get Out’s antagonist, Dean Armitage, is also a surgeon, a neurosurgeon, who, with the help of his hypnotist wife, creates a method of suppressing a body’s owner and transplanting another brain into it. While Armitage’s patients may gain real Black bodies, as opposed to Crookman’s medical transformation, both doctors refuse to address socialization and dialect as tools in the passing of their clientele. Crookman claims, “There is no such thing as Negro dialect,” (15) and in Black No More, he is proven to be correct. But Schuyler’s satire doesn’t ring true in the real world or in the world of Get Out. In the film, language is one of the red flags to Chris, the protagonist, that something is up at the Armitage’s party. When asked to explain what’s wrong with Walter, the groundskeeper, Chris responds: “It’s not what he says, it’s how he says it,” (41:21). The people whose brains have been transplanted in Get Out noticeably talk like old white people because they are old white people. When Chris reaches out to ‘Walter,’ ‘Georgina,’ or ‘Logan’ as bastions of blackness in “White zones” (Poll, 76), the support he reaches for is denied or isn’t available in the first place.

    Ryan Poll outlines the America of Get Out (and our own) as comprising two geographies: zones of Whiteness and of Blackness (77). These zones connote safety and comfort for their respective people, discomfort for others—for outsiders. Chris is an outsider, literally far from home in a remote lakeside house, but he is also isolated utterly, drowned in Whiteness: whether the suffocating corniness of his girlfriend's father or the borderline socially inept, profiling and prodding of party guests. This is a very similar situation to Max in Black No More. When the newly White Max joins a white supremacist group in order to grift them, he is in mortal danger. Even a moment’s contemplation of his ‘true’ race would likely lead to his murder. The geographies are just as significant, but Max is not the one in fear. Black No More is the story of panicking White people who can’t fathom their diminishing social and financial capital and fear the ‘invasion’ of White zones.

    Get Out’s antagonists, the Order of Coagula don’t concern themselves with preserving White zones, or Whiteness. In fact their inspiration is the perversion of a butterfly: shedding their skin and becoming something new, greater. Still, they explicitly target Blackness, Black people, exhibiting their racist ideology. The object of the Order’s fetishization is in the Black body, nothing more, nothing less. They believe that coolness, strength, speed, etc. are the only value which Black people carry, so they are literally auctioned off, mirroring slave auctions, and their humanity and dignity surgically removed and overwritten so a ‘better’(paying) mind can make use of their bodies. Black No More’s Black Americans rush to shed Blackness for overwhelmingly social reasons. The question they ask is not ‘Why be White?’ but ‘Why stay Black?’ The Order of Coagula’s idealizations do not matter because in Schuyler’s 1930s America there is no reason to stay Black, because (according to Schuyler) the only true difference is appearance and looking Black means being a second class citizen.

    The ending of Black No More shows a unified, racially ambiguous, “mulatto-minded” America (112). The ending of Get Out destroys the legacy of the Order of Coagula and (hopefully) all that they have done. Through satire and horror the two works explore different realities in which the line between Black and White is blurred, and urge audiences to explore what that means and how thick the line is in our own reality.

Works Cited

Get Out. 2017. [film] Directed by J. Peele. United States: Universal Studios.


Poll, Ryan. “Can One ‘Get Out?’ The Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 51, no. 2, 2018, pp. 69–102, http://www.jstor.org/stable/45151156. Accessed 2 May 2022.


Schuyler, George, 1931. Black No More. New York: Macaulay Co.

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