Should the black man define himself in reaction to the white man thus confirming the white man as a measure of all things? Or should one strive unremittingly for a concrete and ever new understanding of man? Where is the true mode of resistance actually located? How should the black man speak for himself? Ziauddin Sardar, Foreword to Black Skin, White Masks The artist is no freer than the society in which he lives, and in the United States the writers who stereotype or ignore the Negro and other minorities in the final analysis stereotype and distort their own humanity. Mark Twain knew that in his America humanity masked its face with blackness. Ralph Ellison, “Twentieth-Century Fiction” Every lover of genre films, but particularly black genre film lovers, knows how this script is supposed to go. The black character enters a precarious situation early in the film: a trip to the middle-of-nowhere with some white friends. When things begin to go awry, they are reliably the first to die. This trope is familiar enough to be an enduring punchline famously lampooned by the comedian Eddie Murphy in 1983 and solemnly dissected in Esquire magazine in 2019 (Bruney). However, the 2019 hit horror Midsommar curiously flips the script on our expectations in a way that is indicative of a new trend within genre films that concern race. In Midsommar, a group of students, primarily anthropology graduate students, are invited to visit a once-in-a-generation midsummer ceremony in a secluded Swedish village. Among them is Josh, who is played by the African-American actor William Jackson Harper. While other visitors to the commune make a variety of foolish missteps ostensibly leading to their doom, Josh deftly navigates the community’s customs. He finally transgresses these unspoken rules when he learns of a book created by a child who is a product of incestuous relations among the villagers. Josh sneaks into the temple where the book is kept in order to photograph it and is killed. One of the last glimpses we get of him is of his foot, incongruously planted in a small garden of the commune, sprouting up like a grotesque plant. This strange end to the sole black character is striking in its belatedness and its irony. The rules of the horror genre and Harper’s conspicuous casting lend an outsized significance to his presence. The film takes pains to make visible and estrange whiteness through myriad obscure symbols: at times medieval runes, at other times shapes and rituals that hold some meaning only understood by the Swedish characters and the white Americans informed of the deeper plot. Josh as an “African-American man in a horror film” signifies beyond his character. He is not merely punished for his curiosity, which in the rules of the film would be a fitting end to a nosy anthropologist; he seemingly has died from gazing too long at whiteness. I begin with this vignette and with a quotation that alludes to Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks to frame what I posit to be a new iteration of racial expression on the screen that revises earlier formulations of the “African-American in a genre film” role. Sardar’s 2008 foreword strenuously argues for a reconsideration of Fanon in an updated context of Western civilization (vi). The questions of black expression that Fanon asks, particularly the conundrum he poses about how a black person can speak in tones other than ones structured around whiteness, Sadar argues (and I agree), need to be updated in view of a shifting historical landscape, lest his theoretical work lose it potency. Sadar is interested in a changing political world that has prompted a critical reappraisal of Black Skin, White Masks; I will focus on how the central metaphor of the mask has begun to slip in response to social changes. I will examine how this change has taken place as black creators, black actors, and black characters have begun to achieve greater prominence in genre films. Perhaps as a result of an acute awareness of genre tropes, this slippage has begun to upend genre’s “ways of building-in knowledge of the world” (Jerng 2). I build my argument from Mark Jerng’s ground-clearing work that explores how discursive strategies in nineteenth-century genre fiction were embedded with and instructed readers on habits of reading race. The present argument departs from Jerng’s in its temporal focus and through my examination of how the palimpsest of race/genre meaning making, which Jerng reads as being consolidated in the nineteenth century, are being reordered in ways that detach the meaning of racial masking from its expected signification. Race—for the purposes of this article, blackness—eludes or upends the meanings that genre creates. There is a long history of “passing” films, like Oscar Micheaux’s Veiled Aristocrats (1932) or Fred M. Wilcox’s I Passed for White (1960), which restages the classic “tragic mulatto” narrative; and there is a broader set of racial panic narratives, like Heart Condition (1990), starring Bob Hoskins and Denzel Washington, which tropes on essential racial differences wherein a white body houses a black soul for its comedy. The fundamental questions of racial expression and racial disguise that reify a notion of race as essential seem particularly antiquated, as a spate of films have been produced since the Obama presidency that have fundamentally reassessed the trajectory of black American life from slavery to the present. Ryan Poll, in his “Can Anyone ‘Get Out’ The Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism,” notes that after 2012, the year in which both Quentin Tarantino’s Django: Unchained and Stephen Spielberg’s Lincoln were released, some seven prominent films about black history appeared in 2013, with more following throughout Obama’s presidency (71). Poll uses his accounting of these Obama-era and post-Obama films to suggest a turn in conceptualizing black progress; he then presents Get Out as an Afro-pessimist critique that departs from this wave of films. Countering the overwhelmingly positive critical reception of the film, which served, he argues, to gratify the white gaze and white consciences, Poll recenters blackness within the film to emphasize the “seeming historical fixity” of slavery as an elemental structuring institution of American life (73). The present article follows Poll’s fundamental argument about the need to reassess critical trends in depictions of blackness on screen; however, it will trace the interaction between the depictions of whiteness and blackness as they function generically. This was the case in Midsommar, wherein race operated not just as a concept to be explored through film but as a function interacting with audience expectations of films. This article will examine a small set of recent genre films—Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) and Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018)—not as a definitive statement about a movement in how blackness is depicted on screen but as a proposition about an alternative to both the post-racial and Afro-pessimist critical moves made after the wave of Obama administration movies. Part of my contention is that these films make use of their generic conventions to destabilize the conception of race; more trenchantly, they linger over the notion of abhorrent whiteness, the horror of the sort that Josh sees before his death. The familiar tropes of their forms renegotiate old questions about racial essentialism, particularly how blackness speaks for itself. This poem is notorious for the ambiguity of its final line, which simultaneously bespeaks enforced restriction, necessary self-protection, anxiety, and a proprietary claim. The mask becomes a necessary defense against the appropriation of one’s innermost self while also, paradoxically, leaving the mask itself subject to white uses. The mask renders black subjectivity ambiguous and fugitive from the desires for fixity that serve white interests. Toni Morrison’s classic discussion of the interplay between blackness and whiteness in popular fiction, Playing in the Dark, theorizes “an Africanist character [that] is used to limn out and enforce the invention and implications of whiteness” (52). Pointedly, for the purposes of this discussion, she outlines the long history of white creators, particularly writers of popular fiction, who “make strategic use of black characters” to fulfill white fantasies or confirm white fears. To direct an attack upon Hollywood would indeed be to confuse portrayal with action, image with reality. In the beginning was not the shadow but the act, and the province of Hollywood is not action but illusion. (305) Nonetheless, the illusion is essential, Ellison argues, in how it gratifies white psyches; this illusion is fundamental to the social “ritual” that mediates “democratic beliefs and certain antidemocratic practices (“Twentieth-Century Fiction” 85). A key metaphor for Ellison, as noted in the second epigraph to this article, is the mask, particularly the mask of blackness that permits the misalignment between public and personal values. In terms of artistic creation, Ellison astutely notes that the unwillingness to address the mask “using ingenious devices for evading the full human rights of their Negroes” has resulted in art that fails both in terms of its style and its intellectual purchase (195). This article will follow Ellison’s prompting to consider films that take on the idea of the black mask to intervene in generic expectations while opening up social critique that speculates on the nature of blackness. As I have begun to demonstrate through the example of Midsommar, generic expectations and blackness continue to operate in tandem. Aster’s film demonstrates that these relationships are dynamic and dialectical. The character Josh inverts the expectations for the horror genre in terms of race to more directly gaze on the bewildering whiteness that pervades the film. Josh’s race is used instrumentally here, but points to the possibilities of thinking in novel directions about race in genre filmmaking that I will do in this article. The masking I examine disrupts the dialectic relationship between white attempts to capture blackness and black efforts at eluding that capture by introducing racial tropes in ways that defy genre expectations. Get Out has been celebrated as a genre masterpiece, albeit one that is hybrid in its approach. The critical lens that has been applied to it is has drawn scrutiny for gratifying the elitist white gaze that the film itself satirizes (Poll 71). While it is too early for there to be a critical mass of scholarship on Peele’s subsequent film Us, the tepid initial response to it suggests a possible misunderstanding of the film, if not a more pernicious distaste on the part of critics prompted by the film’s difficult attitude towards the centrality of whiteness. The predominant move Get Out encourages is to read the film on the grounds of white appropriation. The film does this quite literally; it rarely shifts its focus from the lush grounds of the upstate New York property. Simultaneously, while Get Out is ostensibly about white appropriation of blackness, it fixates on whiteness as a nearly incomprehensible power that blackness can merely evade or survive. In both respects, whiteness and property are the paramount issues of the film. Get Out’s situatedness and the focus on white possession of black bodies evokes Cheryl Harris’s conception of whiteness itself as property. As she argues in her seminal essay, “Whiteness as Property,” whiteness has become “a valuable asset that whites sought to protect and those who passed sought to attain” (1713). Indeed, the film’s conceit of white brains inhabiting black bodies is Afro-pessimism taken to its most fantastical extreme, wherein the resilience of white power resides in the literal control of black bodies. Us, a film that fittingly begins on the carnivalesque Santa Cruz boardwalk, offers a funhouse version of the root question about the relationship between race and property. Rather than occupying the well-appointed grounds of an upper-class white family, much of the film takes place in an unremarkable California bungalow in Santa Cruz that Adelaide Wilson (Lupita Nyong’o) has inherited from her mother. This shift in situation signals the broader allegorical shift towards black property as the grounds upon which the film will be contested. Indeed, doppelgängers called “the tethered” arrive at the doorstep of Wilson’s summer home. The tethered, the audience learns, are duplicates of the people living in America who live underground, performing pale imitations of the daily lives of those above them. The location of Us’s action drives home a fundamental difference between this film and Peele’s previous one. Get Out is premised on fugitivity, moments of fleeing. The main character, Chris, must get out of the white family’s house and away from their possession of his mind. Chris is thrown into an abyssal psychological void, called “the sunken place,” where he loses his ability to control his body while he is overwhelmed by traumatic memories; to get out, he must get control of his psyche. Us, on the other hand, suggests that there is nowhere to go. It is the personal spaces of the main characters that are being overtaken, and any modes of escape the film lays out are premised on abandoning one’s own possessions in the broad sense that Get Out presents. The film denies the audience one of the fundamental critical levers available to reckon with race: the language of appropriation falls short in the face of the problem of these doppelgangers. The tethered have impossible demands: to occupy Wilson’s home and be restituted for the comfortable lives they were denied. The easy reading of this film is about contemporary American inequality. Indeed, it is not difficult to see the motif of empty gestures (for example, the Hands Across America campaign that bookends the movie) and violence beneath them as a political critique of American politics linking Ronald Reagan’s administration to Donald Trump’s (Dargis C1). However, to enter this critical rabbit hole would reproduce the problems of decentering blackness noted above. Rather, I would argue that Peele challenges the audience to read through blackness by using a reliable thriller trope—the twist ending—to an improbable effect. After the family has killed their tethered doubles, they escape from Santa Cruz. Intercut between the moments of their relief at their escape are a set of flashbacks informing the viewer that “Adelaide” is in fact her doppelganger who swapped places with her double in the movie’s initial scene. At the end of each of these flashbacks, the younger version Adelaide’s doppelganger smiles ghoulishly towards the camera. These shots convert the seemingly reassuring smile Adelaide gives Jason into a further iteration of malice; this is a peek behind the mask that she has been wearing her whole life. Jason, who has been wearing a Chewbacca mask above his head, slowly lowers it over his face while he gazes at her with a frightened knowing look. Ostensibly what is truly horrific about the twist is what has been taken away from the audience; the viewer must recalibrate Adelaide’s anxiety about the encroaching threat of her tethered, seeing it not from the perspective of her innocence but through her culpability. Moreover, this twist complicates how racial appropriation was raised in Get Out. Jason gazing out of the mask recalls the appropriation that threatens Chris. In Get Out, a blind white man wishes to take over Chris’s body because he admires the way he sees the world; he wants Chris’s gaze. Us advances the problem of appropriating the black gaze by compounding its signification, asking what it means for a black person to appropriate the black gaze. (Indeed, this is what one of the posters for the movie alludes to in its image of Adelaide’s tethered peering out from behind an Adelaide mask.) This question is posed in a variety of self-evident ways throughout the film. For example, Adelaide’s husband, Gabe, initially confronts the tethered versions of themselves using what might be called his white voice. When this doesn’t work, he escalates his rhetoric. He code-switches, adopting black vernacular to try to frighten the family: “Aight, I asked you nice. Now I need y’all to get off my property” (Us). However, the film’s final surprise raises the critical stakes beyond familiar forms of appropriation. Genre collides with the apparatus of racial analysis to provide a critical twist in addition to turning the screws of plot. The revelation that should clarify Us’s mysteries instead throws the audience into deeper confusion. It is unclear if the look that passes between mother and son signals the transmission of intergenerational trauma, making masks necessary to disguise one’s feelings, or if this is a moment of recognition, such that the mask will henceforth be visible, or if there is perhaps solidarity between the two. Uncertainty about the meaning passed between parent and child, ironized by the rapid shift in understanding the audience must undergo pushes to the fore questions about the performance of one’s racial self. Jody Keisner argues in “Do You Want to Watch? A Study of the Visual Rhetoric of the Postmodern Horror Film” that this uncertainty is characteristic of contemporary horror movies, writing, “Horror movies have become postmodern, in part, because of their questioning of reality; they push viewers to consider their own notions of what is real” (416). I would take this argument a step further. The ambivalent meaning behind Adelaide’s smile and the similarly ambivalent moment of Jason literally masking himself throw the viewer into an abyss of blackness reminiscent of the sunken place, insofar as it bespeaks tremendous psychological depths the characters and the viewers sound in puzzling out the meaning of masking. However, unlike Get Out, at no point can whiteness fit into this circuit of appropriation. What the audience witnesses is blackness as property in a sense that is very much parallel to that which Harris deploys to understand whiteness as property: the doppelganger version of Adelaide is willing to protect the terms of the identity that she has appropriated at all costs. The implications of this move are as ironic as they are illuminating. Peele, in an interview about Get Out notes that he saw a “void” in the horror movie genre around black experiences and racism. The agon that forms the climactic set-piece of the film—an intricately choreographed fight between Adelaide and her tethered—is indeed about race, but not in a way that is meant to gratify white gazes. Indeed, the main white characters are killed quickly and nearly as an afterthought (i.e., as black characters often are). The struggle for the possession of Adelaide’s life, family, and home—which ends with the real Adelaide’s murder—reifies the value of blackness as property while simultaneously showing the heavy cost of that appropriation; it threatens to imitate the violent exclusions performed by whites on black bodies. In order to hold on to her middle-class life, Adelaide embraces a means of protecting her status that cannot countenance a world in which she shares her life with her double. As the tethered reminds Adelaide, another version of events was possible; “You could have taken me with you,” she says simply, a statement which upends the valences of malice that undergird the film (Us). Cheryl Harris, in concluding her study on whiteness as property, finishes with what in legal circles might be considered a surprise ending. After thoroughly laying out the history of white suppression of African Americans as a bedrock of modern American life, she abruptly conjectures a future that seeks ways of building sturdy “norms of equality … essential to shedding the legacy of oppression.” She continues: “In protecting the property interest in whiteness, property is assumed to be no more than the right to prohibit infringement on settled expectations, ignoring countervailing equitable claims that are predicated on the right to inclusion” (1791). The end of Us possesses one final ambivalence that intersects with Harris’s conclusions. As the camera leaves Adelaide’s family, it drifts upwards above the line of trees to the height of news helicopters taking in the sight of the tethered remounting the failed symbolic project of Hands Across America, that is, the image that began the movie. This time, the proposed movement is not merely a hollow gesture but a funhouse mirror version of the initial project, showing what a ludicrously radical vision of mobilizing for an equitable future might look like. Facing the audience with the twin horrors of a racially unjust society in which even black success seems to be premised on violence against black bodies and a violent vision of how to jar the country out of its ambivalence towards that injustice, Us asks if there is truly any way to get out. Cassius: People say I talk white anyway, though, so why isn’t it working? Langston: No. You got it wrong. It’s not about sounding all nasal. It’s about sounding like you don’t have a care. Like your bills are paid and you’re happy about your future and you’re about to jump in your Ferrari when you get off this call. Put some extra breath in there. Breezy, like you don’t need this money, like you never been fired, only laid off. It’s not what all white people sound like. There ain’t no real white voice, but it’s what they wish they sounded like. (Riley, Sorry to Bother You 21–22) Here it is important to underscore the paradoxes that emerge from the discussion of the white voice. Cash believes he already “talks white,” which reveals the poverty of the phrase when deployed merely to describe sound. Rather, the white voice is freighted with neoliberal aspirations. Cash undergoes a rapid recalibration of his perspective on what sonic whiteness is, and in doing so he implicates the audience, who similarly must be instructed in how the film construes whiteness. This claim that it is not enough to “talk white” demystifies the notion of whiteness as a racial category. Likewise, the white voice ceases to be read as a universal, unmarked form of communication and instead it is filtered through the effect it produces across the rarefied spaces Cash’s voice reaches (Stoever 46). When he achieves the heights of his career as a “power caller,” he deploys his white voice to convince international power brokers to purchase weapons and contracts to enslave laborers. The white voice intersects with Barthesian notions of listening, particularly his arguments about the medium of the telephone as territorializing and capable of bringing listeners into intimate proximity (“Listening” 247). The collocation of body and territory illuminates the choices the film makes in depicting Cash’s white voice. When he uses the voice, it is presented as an eerie, disembodied experience, quite literally in the sense that it is voiced by a different (white) actor. One character, upon hearing the white voice, ironically describes it as “some freaky voodoo shit” (Riley 31). The cinematic effect of this choice is that Cash’s voice operates like a racial mask, the illusion of the white voice casts a powerful spell, but one that can only work through a medium in which his body is disguised. The notion of the voice as demarcating territory, while containing one’s whole body, has already been complicated by any number of critiques from Black Studies. However, Riley’s innovation comes in creating a narrative that implicates sonic whiteness without creating a narrative about passing. Cash inhabits, through the tropes of the movie, white spaces by assuming the aural affect, not the physical guise, of whiteness. The narrative is constructed around the inadequacy of racial categories to capture the contours of his economic and geographic situation, in other words, being poor in Oakland. And then the narrative twist throws the genre out of joint. In a scene that is staged for surprise and horror rather than the explicit social critique it had been engaged in, it is revealed that the CEO of Cash’s company (Regalview), Steve Lift, seeks to create a species of super-workers genetically modified to have the strength and physical features of horses. The CEO asks Cash to become one of these “equisapiens” and prevent labor unrest among them. His new body, Lift argues, would merely be a guise Cash temporarily inhabits to continue the sonic work he already conducts, although he pointedly likens Cash to Martin Luther King Jr., suggesting that while he needs his voice, not anybody would do. The comparison between Cash and King brings to the fore what had been latent in the film: the lineage of slavery. Low wage work and mass incarceration would be furthered by the enslavement of the equisapiens. The two plots—Cash’s rise through the white voice and the meaning of equisapien labor—sit uneasily next to each other. Cash struggles with crossing the picket line while he also contemplates the possibility of crossing far more substantial borders of bodily change. Early criticism of the film highlighted this abrupt shift in tone as evidence of a novice director not fully in control of his vision; as one reviewer quipped about the film’s final surprise, in which Cash is transformed into an equisapien, the film “feels more juvenile than Juvenalian” (Nayman). Subsequent critique has attempted to wrap this turn in genre into a larger generic move the film makes that puts it in line with economics rights films (Torchin). For his part, Riley has stoutly refused the notion that his work conforms to any genre at all, saying in an interview, “In the end, not having a genre helped me because there was nobody that could tell me the right way to make the movie” (“To Ethnic Studies” 27). What the uncertainty about the film’s genre belies is the collusion between the labor and race plots in the service of a larger move toward rethinking questions of the mask as a means to enforce racial divisions. The movie resurrects the racial passing plot to give it strange new life that questions where blackness fits in the near future society it proposes. The film’s absurd juxtapositions force the viewer to replot their expectations for conceptualizing the sonic color line as a means of disciplining bodies of color through racial discernment based on sound. The sonic economy is inextricably tied with the economy writ large; Cash’s transgressions evoke a broader set of betrayals than those of race. The film presents the strikers Cash storms past to enter his office as a racially diverse coalition; when Cash speaks to one of the equisapiens “loudly and slowly, as if talking to an alien” he responds, “C’mon dude. I grew up in East Oakland. I can understand you if you talk regular” (Riley 113–14). Cash’s discomfort with his own voice’s unexpected layers of significance—his voice permits him to surpass racial boundaries when he is on the phone and potentially his physical form entirely without displacing him completely from expected social allegiances—points to a failure of intersectionality as a means to come to terms with the confusion in which Cash finds himself. He is unable to form a stable set of identities for himself and he also misattributes the identity categories of those around him. The anxiety this film examines is broader than the issue of the white voice, although that becomes the symptom in which they ground their mediations. Sorry to Bother You lingers over the problem of determining the extent to which racial/ethnic identity is produced and what happens when the terms of production shift. The multiple border crossings their characters undertake—across the boundaries of biology, class, legal authority—construct a new matrix of identity that cannot be folded back into simple constructions of racial/ethnic categories. The construction of new categories is held at arm’s length for much of the movie. The equisapiens are only briefly glimpsed and the main characters rarely interact with them. Cash believes that he has been tricked into snorting the substance that will transform him into an equisapien; however, he shows no signs of change for almost the entirety of the film, leading the viewer to perhaps believe that the threat of him becoming an equisapien is held out merely as a metaphor for new solidarities Cash forges in his fight against Regalview. The film proper concludes with moments of reconciliation between Cash and the friends that he has alienated in his dalliance with amoral capitalist pursuits. However, the return to normal is shattered by a musical sting and the reveal that Cash has indeed become an equisapien. The change is depicted with Cash in mid-transformation, his face still somewhat recognizable beneath the heavy prosthetics that make his face and hands look like those of a horse. As was the case with the final moment of (un)masking in Us, the transformation Cash undergoes is deeply ambiguous, only somewhat clarified by a final scene in which Cash and other equisapiens smash their way into the home of Regalview’s founder to exact their revenge on him. In this final sequence, Cash drops the “white voice” that he has deployed to open corporate doors and even his normal cadence. His voice as an equisapien is deeper and the final sound of the film is Cash’s terrifying bray. The ambiguity of the final moment, the uncertainty about Cash’s intentions, particularly if he would want to return to human form, is a seismic shift from the racial conventions that so often compose the notion of the Other in science fiction and horror (the primary genres of Sorry to Bother You). The film subverts the expectations of the racialized other as monstrous other by embracing the reality of Cash’s blackness and incorporating it within the hybrid body of the equ