Abstract
Most critics trace the inception of the Weird to H. P. Lovecraft, whose infamous racial politics undergird the uncanny representations that constitute the genre. These critical arrangements are evident in Boots Riley's 2018 film Sorry to Bother You. This essay argues that Riley's film literalizes discourses that equate black people with animals and thus highlights how the white fantasy about black sub-humanity persists despite a neoliberal progress narrative invested in the notion that racism is obsolete. The Weird in Riley's film at once reveals the perversely uncanny nature of racism itself and rejects the notion that racism is a function of time rather than of a deeper, ontological crisis in white consciousness. If the future is a construct upon which we project our post-racial "hopes for tomorrow," then Riley's film asks, "What is the future?" Because for the black person, as Sorry to Bother You shows us, the past is prologue.
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