The Movie ‘Get Out’ Is a Strong Antidote to the Myth of ...



After taking the Implicit Bias Tests, you are aware that implicit bias can affect our perceptions of many different “categories.” How is race different from ethnicity, religion or sexuality? How might these differences exacerbate the problem of implicit bias?Recently, many films have depicted racial struggle in America (e.g. Moonlight, Selma, the remake of Birth of a Nation, Hidden Figures, Loving, Fences, I Am Not Your Negro, Get Out). What does this suggest about the current state of race relations in this country? View Part 1 of the documentary, Race: The Power of an Illusion (The Difference Between Us). What does this say about race as a category? More information can be found on the program website.Read the short Nadra Kareem Nittle article and the chapter from Dorothy Robert’ book , Fatal Invention. How has our misunderstanding of race affected medical treatment in America? You should discuss Tuskegee, Eugenics, Sterilization, Health Disparities, etc. in your response. What can we do to change these outcomes in medicine? What can we do in general?After watching the film, Get Out, read (or listen to—there’s an embedded link for this in the article) the Atlantic article, Is This How Discrimination Ends? Summarize the author’s opinion and provide your reaction to it and this mini-unit below.How Racism in Health Care Has Affected Minorities Over the YearsForced sterilizations and the Tuskegee syphilis study make this listby? HYPERLINK "" Nadra Kareem NittleUpdated March 01, 2016It’s long been said that good health is one’s most important asset, but racism in health care has made it difficult for people of color to take charge of their health.Minority groups have not only been deprived of quality health care, they’ve also had their human rights violated in the name of medical research.?Racism?in medicine in the 20th century influenced health care professionals to partner with government officials to sterilize black, Puerto Rican and Native American women without their full consent and to conduct experiments on people of color involving syphilis and the birth control pill. Untold numbers of people died because of such research.But even in the 21st century, racism continues to play a role in health care, with studies finding that doctors often harbor racial biases that influence their treatment of minority patients. This roundup outlines the wrongs that have been perpetuated because of medical racism while highlighting some of the racial progress that’s been made in medicine.The Tuskegee and Guatemala Syphilis Studies A syphilis public service announcement. Wellcome Images/Since 1947, penicillin has widely been used to treat a range of diseases. In 1932, however, there was no cure for sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis. That year, medical researches launched a study in collaboration with the?Tuskegee?Institute in Alabama called “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.”Most of the test subjects were poor black sharecroppers who were compelled to do the study because they were promised free health care and other services. However when penicillin was widely used to treat syphilis, the researchers failed to offer this treatment to the Tuskegee test subjects. This led some of them to needlessly die, not to mention pass on their illness to their family members.In Guatemala, the U.S. government paid for similar research to be conducted there on vulnerable people such mental patients and prison inmates. While the Tuskegee test subjects eventually received a settlement, no compensation has been awarded to the victims of the Guatemala Syphilis Study.Women of Color and Compulsory SterilizationDuring the same time period that medical researchers targeted communities of color for unethical syphilis studies, government agencies were also targeting women of color for sterilization. The state of North Carolina women had a eugenics program that aimed to stop poor people or the mentally ill from reproducing, but a disproportionate amount of the women ultimately targeted were black women. In the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, the medical and government establishment targeted working class women for sterilization, in part, to lower the island’s unemployment. Puerto Rico eventually earned the dubious distinction of having the highest sterilization rate in the world. What’s more, some Puerto Rican women died after medical researchers tested early forms of the birth control pill on them.In the 1970s, Native American women reported being sterilized at Indian Health Service hospitals after going in for routine medical procedures such as appendectomies. Minority women were heavily singled out for sterilizations because the largely white male medical establishment believed that lowering the birth rate in minority communities was in society’s best interest.Medical Racism Today?Medical racism affects people of color in contemporary America in a variety of ways. Doctors unaware of their unconscious racial biases may treat patients of color differently, such as lecturing them, speaking more slowly to them and keeping them longer for visits.Such behaviors lead minority patients to feel disrespected by medical providers and sometimes suspend care. In addition, some physicians fail to give patients of color the same range of treatment options as they offer to white patients.Medical experts such as Dr. John Hoberman say that medical racism won’t dissipate until medical schools teach doctors about the history of institutional racism and its legacy today.Kaiser’s Landmark Poll on The Black Female Experience Healthcare organizations have been accused of overlooking the experiences of people of color. In late 2011, however, Kaiser Family Foundation sought to examine the unique perspectives of black women by partnering with the Washington Post to survey more than 800 African American women.The foundation examined black women’s attitudes on race, gender, marriage, health and more. One surprising finding of the study is that?black women are more likely to have higher self-esteem than white women, even though they’re likely to be heavier and not fit society’s beauty norms.The Movie ‘Get Out’ Is a Strong Antidote to the Myth of ‘Postracial’ AmericaEditorial Observer (NY Times)By?BRENT STAPLES?MARCH 27, 2017 Allison Williams as Rose and Daniel Kaluuya as Chris in “Get Out,” a film directed by Jordan Peele. Credit Justin Lubin/Universal PicturesThe touchstone scene in the new horror film “Get Out” depicts a 20-something white woman named Rose appraising the sculpted torsos of black athletes on a laptop as she sits in her bedroom?sipping milk through a straw. In another context — say, in the popular HBO television series “Girls” — this would be an unremarkable example of a millennial catching a glimpse of beefcake on the way to bed.In this case, the director Jordan Peele wants the audience to see Rose as what she is: the 21st-century equivalent of the plantation owner who studies the teeth and muscles of the human beings he is about to buy at a slave market. Like her antebellum predecessors, Rose — who has recently delivered her black boyfriend into the hands of her monstrous family — is on the hunt for handsomest, buffest specimen she can find.“Get Out” speaks in several voices on several themes. It subverts the horror genre itself — which has the well-documented habit of killing off black characters first. It comments on the re-emergence of white supremacy at the highest levels of American politics. It lampoons the easy listening racism that so often lies behind the liberal smile in the “postracial” United States. And it probes the systematic devaluation of black life that killed people like Trayvon Martin, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice and Eric Garner.The film is a disquisition on the continuing impact of slavery in American life. Among other things, it argues that present-day race relations are heavily determined by the myths that were created to justify enslavement — particularly the notion that black people were never fully human.The project of reconnecting this history to contemporary life is well underway. Historians have shown, for example, that slavery, once abolished under law, continued by other means, not least of all as disenfranchisement, mass incarceration and forced labor. Lynchings, those carnivals of blood once attended by thousands of people, morphed into a sanitized, state-sanctioned death penalty that is still disproportionately used against people of color.Novelists have followed the same line of inquiry, urged on by the desire to debunk the delusional rhetoric of “postracialism” that gained currency when the country elected its first African-American president.This counternarrative pervades Paul Beatty’s complex comic novel “The Sellout” —?winner?of the 2016 Man Booker Prize — whose African-American narrator attempts to resurrect slavery and segregation as a way of both deconstructing white supremacy and preventing the black community where he grew up from being erased.Similarly, the Ben H. Winters thriller?“Underground Airlines”?unveils an eerily familiar America in which the Civil War never happened and the United States Marshals Service cooperates with slave-holding states to track down people who have escaped to freedom.The novelist Colson Whitehead deploys the counternarrative to great effect in “The Underground Railroad” — winner of the?2016 National Book Award?— by subverting the shiny, optimistic escape-to-freedom story as it is so often told.The underground railroad in this case is a real train that runs underground, not straight and true, but through dead ends and hellish catastrophes. This train travels across time as it takes the bondswoman from one destination to another, exposing her to unspeakable violence and the evolving versions of white supremacy that formed the actual journey from slavery to freedom.Despite its comic elements, “Get Out” is cut from the same cloth. Indeed, the affluent white community into which Rose introduces her African-American boyfriend, Chris, has the flavor of the Stepford stop on Mr. Whitehead’s dystopian railroad.Rose’s family plays to a familiar plantation trope with black retainers who are eerily not quite right but who are represented as being almost like family. The patriarch tries to set Chris at ease, assuring him that he likes black people and “would have voted for Obama a third time” were it possible.The faux affability heightens the sense of the sinister. Chris learns that the white people around him are coveting his body and would like nothing more than to try it on as a kind of second skin.It would be wrong to reduce this film to an attack on white liberals who mouth racial platitudes. Mr. Peele sets out to debunk the myth of “postracialism” generally — by showing that the country is still gripped by historically conditioned preconceptions of race and blackness. ................
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