The Long 2010s and the Cinematics of Black Betrayal

The Long 2010s and the Cinematics of Black Betrayal

“[...] the familiarity of this narrative does nothing to appease the hunger of recorded memory, nor does the persistence of the repeated rob these well-known, oft-told events of their power, even now, to startle” 

— Hortense Spillers, Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book

“Lord, that Hollywood train, forever coming round the bend!”

— James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work 

“When the axe came into the forest, the trees said ‘the handle is one of us’”

— Turkish proverb 

Through film, a visual culture of Black disillusionment and skepticism has emerged across various genres, particularly that of drama, horror, thriller, and dark comedy. In 2017, the year that marks the official end of the Obama administration, movie-going audiences ushered in the success of Jordan Peele’s Get Out, and in the years that followed, Black directed and/or written films such as Black Panther, Sorry to Bother You, Blackkklansman, The Hate U Give, Harriet, and Queen & Slim earned widespread acclaim. In these films, representations of this intraracial angst and anxiety are often portrayed within the confines of the domestic or other kinds of institutional enclosures. Narratives of infiltration, incorporation, collaboration, membership recur throughout this cinematic era.  Through their insistence on reifying the interior, the “inside,” and the domestic as the site of these potential betrayals, these films can be understood as narrative legacies of the “house slave” caricature—a pejorative figure who most often marked by a conflation between Black domesticity/institutional life and proximities to whiteness and/or white power structures. 

A domestic horror for our time, 2017’s Get Out, effectively set the tone for this growing archive of Black cinema of the 2010s and its preoccupation with the various ways in which the inability to trust other Black people proves to have high stakes for a number of fictional Black characters. A social thriller à la Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Peele’s film follows the story of Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a young Black photographer who, along with his white girlfriend Rose Armitage (Allison Williams), embarks on a trip to “meet the family” for the first time. Unbeknownst to Chris, his visit to the Armitage home unearths an elaborate family plot to capture Black people (mostly men) for a procedure known as the “cornucopia.” As we come to understand, our protagonist has entered a community in which white people have developed the scientific technology to psychologically inhabit Black bodies. This conceit, as the film demonstrates, opens up a whole host of problems for the Black characters who must negotiate both bodily and psychological autonomy against great odds. Among these problems, none is given as much screen time as the matter of intraracial social disconnect. In other words, it is only through Chris’s awkward encounters with the Armitage’s Black domestic staff, Georgina (Betty Gabriel) and Walter (Marcus Henderson) that the scope of interracial bodysnatching and the unique terror of intraracial distrust plays out. After all, if the film’s conceit requires that all Black people are inhabitable (as in, available for lobotomy) then no Black person can be trusted as a safe haven for another. 

In a now infamous scene from Get Out, Chris has an encounter with Georgina that makes legible the eerie and unsettling danger lingering beneath the surface of the Armitages’ pleasantries. When Georgina—a Black woman who is later revealed to have the white Armitage grandmother occupying her body—unplugs Chris’s phone on numerous occasions, his frustrations led him to confront the family housekeeper. As she apologetically explains away her interference, Chris mirrors her and stands down from his accusational posture. “It's fine,” he remarks. “I wasn't trying to snitch.” Unfamiliar with the colloquial vernacular which Chris presumes that she, as a Black woman, would understand, Georgina continues to jar Chris with her disrespect for intraracial in-group norms. Providing an explanation for his early uneasiness, Chris expounds: “All I know is sometimes if there's too many white folks, I get nervous, you know.” And to his surprise, it becomes quite clear that Georgina does not, in fact, know. In an attempt to assuage his concerns, the white woman inside of Georgina ultimately heightens Chris’s worries about the Armitage home. 

As she transitions from a fit of soft laughter into tears, Georgina responds: “Oh, no. No. No! No, no. No-no-no-no-no-no-no-no-no. Aren't you something? That's not my experience. Not at all. The Armitages are so good to us. They treat us like family.” In this moment, we witness Georgina’s body in physical conflict, her body’s reactions growing exceedingly inconsistent with her words. And though the tears rolling down her face hint at the insurrection within, the exchange is a testament to white suppression and misunderstanding. Though the white Armitage matriarch is able to subdue her Black host’s cries for help, she was ineffective in alleviating Chris’s concerns. Though she inhabits a Black woman’s body, this white woman does not understand the communal and social expectations such a person would inherit and/or be socialized into. Thus, in reifying her allegiances to the Armitages, Georgina aligns herself with the very source of Chris’ discomfort and therein, establishes herself as a potential Black enemy rather than a potential comrade.   

Throughout Get Out, save for Chris’s friend Rod (Lil Rel Howery), all other Black characters in the film function as outright threats or most commonly, as embodiments of a characteristic apathy toward Chris’s plight as a Black man who, colloquially speaking, should’ve known better than to trust a white woman. In yet another scene in which Black characters betray our protagonist and his lone helpmate, we witness Rod reaching out to police for help finding his now missing friend. When he tells Detective Latoya (Erika Alexander), a Black female cop, that he believes his friend has been kidnapped by a white family, the detective invites her colleagues, fellow Black officers, into her office so that they may laugh at Rel’s story and Chris’s predicament alongside her. It is not so much that the officers do not believe Rod. As they make clear, it is something else entirely. They simply do not have sympathy for Chris. “Oh white girls. They get you everytime,” Detective Latoya remarks as her laugh bellows and fills the room. 

Unlike Georgina, Detective Latoya does not represent the intraracial conflict of failed communication. Whereas Georgina represents those Black people who cannot read cultural cues, who feel comfortable around white people, and thus, cannot be trusted, Detective Latoya registers a different intraracial angst, that of judgment. Just as Chris judges Georgina for her proximity to whiteness, Detective Latoya can do the same for him. Nonetheless, what the film’s only Black female characters have in common is their gendered and racialized disloyalty to Chris. Where Chris’s life is concerned, Detective Latoya passes the buck and Georgina, following Chris’ sentimental effort to save her upon escape, attempts to kill our protagonist with her own bare hands. Though she is to be understood as a victim of body-snatching, Georgina’s inhabiting of a Black woman’s body and assumption of a domestic role within a white household conjures images of the “house slave” as well as “the help” of post-Emancipation America. A narrative and material descendant of the domestic slave, Georgina is depicted as a Black figure who is both internally and externally domesticated by white influences. 

Where gender is concerned, the possibility of Black allegiance is only realized through the film’s male characters. In addition to Rod, there are two other Black men who ultimately assist Chris in escaping, the Armitage family groundskeeper Walter (Marcus Henderson) and a former acquaintance-turned-victim Andre/Logan (Lakeith Stanfield). Chris sees Andre at a gathering  hosted by the Armitage family and subsequently reaches out in the hopes of bonding with the only other Black man in attendance. What he soon discovers is that Andre now goes by the name ‘Logan’ and has since developed not only a new wardrobe but also entirely new mannerisms and speech patterns. When Chris goes to dap him up, Andre simply holds his hand. 

Whilst taking a stealth picture of Andre to reference his past, Chris forgets to turn his flash off and, unbeknownst to him, breaks the hypnosis Andre was put under for his procedure. Abruptly jolted back to reality, Andre’s first act upon regaining consciousness and control over his body and mind is to warn Chris of the danger he will later face. Delivering the film’s titular lines, Andre, in panicked fury, screams as his nose bleeds. “Get out!” he shouts at Chris. Though our protagonist does not yet understand this outburst as a rescue effort, this exchange is instrumental in increasing Chris’s suspicions of the people around him. Unlike Andre, Walter is entirely unfamiliar to Chris. A groundskeeper who is revealed to be inhabited by Armitage's late grandfather, Walter originally engages with Chris in a similar manner to Georgina. However, his awkward behavior and lack of cultural connection are redeemed at the end of the film. Upon flashing a light in Walter’s face, Chris briefly frees him from psychological bondage. With his small moment of freedom, Walter makes two major decisions. He shoots Rose and he kills himself. Securing both his and Chris’s liberation, Walter effectively closes out all remaining and immediate threats to Chris’s survival, himself included. 

In the end, while the plot of Get Out hinges on betrayals by white characters like Rose, it is, in fact, the disloyalty and the domestication of its black characters which creates the true sense of horror within the film, particularly where it’s Black protagonist is concerned. Georgina, Walter, and Andre each serve as reminders that racial embodiment alone cannot be trusted, yet only Georgina is denied an opportunity to establish interiority and racial allegiance. In this way, she is made to carry the narrative position of the race traitor whilst Walter is afforded the narrative opportunity to shed the trappings of the traitorous and domesticated Black figure. Thus, the film’s landscape of horror relies on Georgina’s failure to redeem herself. 

Furthermore, the geographic positioning of these two characters further entrenches the dichotomy of the “house slave” vs. the “field slave” as one which indexes one's capacity for rebellion against white authority. Whereas Georgina is relegated almost entirely to the Armitage home, Walter remains outdoors throughout the film. Though he is made creepy by his awkward and intense behavior, Walter is largely depicted as a figure on the periphery of the domestic sphere—he can be found outside chopping wood or running laps at any time of the day or night. Georgina (presumably) sleeps inside. Thus, Walter is given access to narrative redemption where Georgina is not. Stuck on this inside of the white domestic sphere, she is the embodiment of a “perfect slavery.”  

In reading Georgina as the archetypal race traitor of Get Out, it cannot go unmentioned that the film’s ability to frame a Black woman in psychological bondage as a figure of intraracial betrayal is made possible by the contemporary politics surrounding Black women’s labor, domestic work, and the legacy of plantation and urban slavery. Georgina’s job as a domestic worker in the 21st century sets her character up to be scrutinized and read within the distinct historical and political context of her predecessors—enslaved domestics and their daughters who, in the wake of Emancipation, earned the title of “the help” and went on to continue the labor of maintaining white domiciles throughout the United States. In To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War, historian Tera Hunter writes of the “bottom rail” in the Reconstruction South—the working-class Black women whose labor kept Southern urban centers afloat. Writing of the 1881 washerwoman’s strike in Atlanta, Georgia, Hunter articulates the political and cultural landscape across which Black women in the wake of slavery fought to renegotiate the terms of their labor and reorganize workspaces so as to avoid the geography of white households. Contextualizing the late 19th and early 20th century as a period marked by passionate grassroots efforts to get Black women out of white homes, a political critique of Black domestic work as a legacy of slavery begins to take shape. With this increasingly critical stance on domestic labor in mind, it is no wonder then that Black domestic too is left behind in favor of signifiers of Black power and uplift that are distinctively corporate, anti-labor, and/or otherwise non-domestic. 

Though Get Out’s Georgina finds herself working in the Armitage home in the 21st century, her attire and mannerisms are intended to conjure the imagery of the Reconstruction era’s “help.” Unlike the women of that era, however, Georgina asserts that hers is a position with no room for improvement. In fact, she states that the Armitages treat her as “family,” thereby representing herself as an extension of the white household (a posture that retrospectively hints at the existence of the white matriarch inside her). By putting up no apparent resistance to the racial order of the Armitage household, Georgina does not uphold the political stance of Black domestic workers fighting to negotiate their labor and lives outside of white surveillance. Rather, she positions herself as a permanent fixture of the Armitage home and dies trying to protect the family’s tradition. In a film set over a century after the 1881 washerwoman’s strike, a line is drawn in the sand where the matter of Black women’s domestic work is concerned—Georgina’s choice to align herself with the white household is one and the same as a choice to stay in bondage. As Get Out reminds us, the Black domestic is perhaps, the figure most easily and haphazardly framed in this way. In popular imagination, she is at best, a holdover from the Black past, and at worst, a servile threat to Black futurity. 

On the matter of Black futures, the rise of American corporate culture and its corresponding policies of inclusion ushered in entirely new possibilities for Black financial prosperity within previously segregated labor markets. And where intraracial betrayal is concerned, the rise of a Black elite within the landscape of the corporate sector only expanded the various ways in which disloyalty could be constituted. Though policies of affirmative action date back to the Reconstruction era, the 1960s gave way to a wave of  initiatives explicitly sought to address racial discrimination in hiring practices in companies and universities, and as a result, their roll out led to the placement of various Black people in prominent and unprecedented corporate position. Without the trappings of domestic labor, which is so often read as a legacy of slavery,  the anti-Black social formations which inform the corporate world and engender the popular representation of the so-called “corporate sell-out” have been problematized and critiqued with less frequency than that of the Black domestic traitor. 

Yet, despite popular resistance to seeing the relationship between the plantation and the office space, the visual discourses surrounding the corporate sell-out on-screen take many of their cues from the tropes that define otherwise domesticated  narratives of intraracial betrayal. In other words, though the corporate sell-out is rarely associated with the same rural southern geographies as might be associated with the “house slave,” this figure is still often represented through extravagant aesthetics and/or luxurious domestic holdings. Furthermore, the plantation logics of house v. field are often shown to overwrite the corporate environment, as portrayed through the distinctive work environments occupied by Black employees over the course of their narrative promotion. 

When we first meet Cassius “Cash” Green (Lakeith Stanfield), the protagonist of 2018’s Sorry to Bother You, it is notable that Cash is not simply broke, but also, houseless. Living in the garage of his uncle's Oakland, California home, Cash does not have much to his name. Even his broken down car is a hand-me-down. In an effort to improve his circumstances and finally pay off the 4-month rent debt he’s incurred, Cash sets out on a job hunt. Eventually, after lying on an interview, he gets a pass and talks his way into a gig at RegalView, a massive telemarketing outfit. At the call center, Cash is immediately instructed in the ways of the labor landscape. At an employee training, an overzealous manager named Diana addresses the staff: “You are not employees anymore. You are team members! Almost family,” she explains. As one might expect, this attempt to diminish the employee-employer labor relation in favor of the familial falls flat, the manager’s words teaming with insincerity. Pushing Diana on her assertion, Cash follows up on the meaning of Diana’s assertion.  “Do we get paid more?” he asks. In response, Diana smiles and shakes her head, her non-verbal reply speaking volumes. Through this exchange, Cash learns his first corporate lesson: Communication is a tool that takes many forms, and some of the best communicators say no words at all. 

  After completing his training, Cash begins to work and struggles to secure a sale from his calls whilst “stick[ing] to the script.”  Later, a defeated Cash is instructed by an elder Black man, a co-worker named Langston (Danny Glover), of the best way to increase his success at the call center. “You wanna make some money here, then read the script with a white voice,” Langston tells him. As Langston explains, taking on a “white voice” is more than mere mimicry—it is a practice that requires full immersion. More aspirational than authentic, the white voice is “what [white people] wish they sounded like.” Here, the language of wishing opens up a discourse on desire. To reap the financial rewards that come with the white voice one must first embrace an intimacy with white desire. “It’s about sounding like you don’t have a care,” Langston elaborates. A quick study, Cash masters the white voice with ease, tapping into a sonic register of carefree whiteness.  During these scenes in which he employs the white voice, Cash’s corporate triumph is marked by the dubbing over of his natural voice with a presumably white one. Disturbed by the voice, his social circle quickly admonishes him for code-switching, dubbing the trick, “puppet master voodoo shit.” Nonetheless, it is through this very mastery of vocality— an internal expression made external—that Cash is able to leverage himself in the white corporate world. 

At RegalView, the opportunities for upward mobility and promotion are made clear from the start. The best title a call center worker can acquire is that of the “power caller”—an employee whose abundant sales elevate their corporate status to that of an industry insider who is generously compensated and incorporated into the less visible arms of the company. A highly coveted yet mysterious position, the role of the power caller is accessible for very few in the RegalView office, but with the power of the white voice he has harnessed, Cash quickly rises in the ranks and as a power caller, he gains access to a higher wage and security clearance than he once held. In many ways, this abrupt shift in status is made most visible through Cash’s personal life which is heavily informed by his corporate one. His best friend Salvador (Jermaine Fowler) is also his coworker at the center and his fiance Detroit (Tessa Thompson) is an artist and part-time sign twirler who also takes shifts at the center to bring in extra money. Even the newest addition to this inner circle, Squeeze (Steven Yeun), is yet another employee at RegalView. Seeing as though his corporate life bleeds so much into his personal one, the shifts in his private life serve as indications that aid in tracking his corporate advancement throughout the film’s overarching narrative. 

Where Cash’s private life is concerned, his relationship with Detroit serves as the most consequential indication of his rise within RegalView. As a character, Detroit is both enigmatic and elusive, and yet, her relationship with Cash generates most of its significance within the film as a kind of narrative thermometer. As film critic Jourdain Searles noted that even Detroit’s nomenclature carries weight, “even her name, Detroit, invokes a legacy of racial and economic inequality, as well as the rich legacy of organizing to fight it.” Despite this history embedded within her name, Detroit, as a visual artist and performer, is a character with very limited development. In fact, her labor within RegalView and as a sign twirler are largely represented as quirky character details that fail to integrate her into the world of the movie. And though she works at least two low-wage jobs over the course of the film, she is never quite at the center of the plot’s analysis of the working-class’s plight. Nonetheless, when their relationship runs hot, Detroit and Cash’s are aligned by their passion for one another despite the major misalignment between their attitudes and approaches to life. Unlike Cash, Detroit has a clearer sense of her purpose and principles. Cash, on the other hand, has no clear motivations other than making money. This discrepancy in motives engenders distance between the young couple and, as a result ,Detroit is often on the periphery of Cash’s concerns and her own priorities, particularly her art, do not occupy a position of major importance to him. 

 When the relationship between Cash and Detroit runs cold, it is in large part due to his embrace of the corporate world and the white power structures that uphold it. The split in their relationship directly parallels his ascent within RegalView just as the company’s skeletons are being pulled out of the closet. Still, just as we witness Detroit laying with Cash in bed when he lives in his uncle’s garage, we also see her in Cash’s new place, which he is able to afford once he gets his power caller promotion. Only later in the film, when Cash begins to choose his allegiance to the company over his commitments to their relationship, his friends, and all concepts of integrity, does Detroit truly begin to stray from their union. Feeling neglected by Cash and his intense relationship to the power structures of the corporate world, Detroit cheats on Cash with Squeeze, the union organizer. Revealing yet another recurring trope within the cinematic phenomenon of Black traitors on-screen, Cash experiences the sexual rejection that often befalls the sell-out. Within the landscape of American cinematic tropes, this particular pattern is two-dimensional. Just as the Black (male) traitor suffers sexual rejection (often by Black women in particular), it is notable that this figure is also frequently realized through sexual desire from or for white people (see: Lydia and Silas from Birth of a Nation or Chris and Walter from Get Out).  In other words, cinematic representations of intraracial betrayal are often marked by one’s bedfellows.

When Cash first becomes a power caller, his partner Detroit is the first to comment about the nature of his work and the dark dealings that overdetermine the success of RegalView. When Cash attempts to leave her art show early to attend a party, Detroit issues a critique through a question. “Slave auctioneers party?” she asks. Avoiding conflict, Cash does not respond to her rhetorical suggestion. He already knows the answer. As he learned upon his ascent to power caller status, RegalView secretly sells military arms as well as labor from WorryFree—an arm of the company that requires its employees to sign lifetime contracts to work and be housed in factories. Where WorryFree enters the plot of Sorry to Bother You, slavery follows.  The first time the company and its contracts are mentioned, the severity of the scheme is not yet revealed. Cash’s uncle, Sergio, having fallen on hard times, informs Cash that not only is it too late for him to pay off his rent debt, but it is too late for his uncle to save himself from foreclosure. After sharing the bad news, Sergio tells his nephew about a brochure he received in the mail from WorryFree. Seeking salvation from the debt, the middle-aged man remarks upon the lifetime contracts which the media refers to as “a new form of slavery” and draws a parallel to his past. “It don’t sound that bad,” he remarks. “Three hots and a cot, like we used to say.” 

As news of WorryFree’s lifetime labor contracts spread, protests break out throughout the Bay Area as the company's policies begin to register with the public. Meanwhile, the employees of RegalView, corralled and organized by Squeeze, have already begun to form a union to address labor conditions in the call center. And as the world around begins to kindle under the fires of public backlash and worker resistance, Cash doubles down on his power caller position at RegalView and becomes a model of class traitorship within the film’s unionization plot. Yet, even as a power caller,  Cash finds himself to be expendable. As the company faces crowds of protesters, he and another white-voiced Black power caller are placed on the front lines without protection as their white superiors are flanked by riot geared police. Cash, a pawn in a brutal and bureaucratic game of corporate chess, is subsequently made into collateral. When protestors throw cans at company officials, it is the power caller who suffers the projectile—breaking skin and bearing bloody bandages as foot soldiers in a war they have waged through cowardice and complicity.  

In scenes such as these, the film’s engagement with matters of betrayal plays out largely over issues of corporate v. worker concerns. As Cash rises in the ranks, his relationship to the conditions of his working-class peers begins to diminish. Cash, as the film’s central protagonist, also doubles as a minor antagonist. Furthermore, as the domestic lives of those around him are shrouded in precarity, it is the improvement of Cash’s domestic circumstances which signal his emergence as a traitorous figure. Not unlike Get Out, Sorry to Bother You relies on these domestic tropes to represent the traitorous protagonist as one who either dwells in or is able to acquire the trappings of a domestic life. In Sorry to Bother You, the legacy of “house slave” and/or domesticated Black traitor lingers in the details of the plot which the film seeks to visualize. First, we note that Cash does not have a true home for the majority of the film. Living in a garage (a transient site for the storage of transportation vehicles), his domestic life is defined by stagnancy and class immobility. Yet, when he becomes a power caller, Cash is moved from cubicles into the corporate “big house,” and as a result of this promotion, he finally gets a home of his own. In this way, major changes in his domestic life serve to indicate his progression as a traitor. As a sell-out, his characterization is marked by both domestic prosperity and the fracturing of his intimate life. 

Sorry to Bother You, written and directed by rapper-activist Boots Riley, makes an anti-hero of its protagonist in order to arrange the stakes of its primary narrative concern: labor. From its character names to the plot twists which close out its narrative,  Sorry to Bother You operates like an elaborate cinematic metaphor for communist concerns regarding the condition of the worker, the workplace, and the society which produces them both. In its efforts to build a narrative around this argument against capitalism, the film centers not only on the figure of the “class traitor” but a Black one in particular. And though many of the film’s Black characters express great frustration with the state of capitalist exploitation, it is not until Squeeze, a (non-black) Asian man enters the workplace that the possibility of unionization and resistance is even introduced within the plot. In this way, the film offers up a narrative of betrayal in which the Black sellout is yet again the object of scrutiny and narrative attention. Worse yet, the film situates WorryFree, a corporate plot which innovates enslavement, as a development that hinges on the actions of an individual Black protagonist, as if the very logics which undergird the construction of WorryFree were not first established in “the hold” and on the plantation. 

In chapter four of W.E.B. Du Bois’ 1935 Black Reconstruction, entitled “The General Strike,” the late 19th-century sociologist writes of the slave as a worker and elucidates “how  the Civil War meant emancipation and how the Black worker won the war by a general strike which transferred his labor from the Confederate planter to the Northern invader, in whose army lines workers began to be organized as a new labor force.” Citing Marx, Du Bois draws on theories of proletariat uprisings to highlight the labor relations under which the slave, in their resistance, renegotiates the social contract. Of the chapter, Guy Emerson Mount writes “Du Bois’s insistence on black people as a revolutionary proletariat during the Civil War pointed to a glaring hole in both Marxist theories surrounding slavery and the more general study of African Americans by professional academics.” Yet, the matter of the slave as laborer remains contested. After all, as historian James Oakes asserts in his analysis of the Du Bois chapter,  “[The General Strike] conjured up industrial capitalism far more than plantation slavery.” And if Marx is, in fact, the reference which Du Bois’s argument uses to tether the plantation to the picket line, one is left to wonder how an equivalence of this kind may obscure the relations beyond labor that distinguish the slave from the employee. For, as Frank Wilderson III asserts in Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, when Marx states at the end of the first volume of Capital that ‘conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, and in short, force, play the greatest role in the methods of primitive accumulation,’ he is referencing the “methods which produce the Slave.” As Wilderson attests, this is a “revealing observation about the psychic disposition of the proletariat.” “In drawing a distinction between the worker and the Slave, Marx points out that the Slave has no wage, no symbolic stand-in for an exchange of labor power,” Wilderson writes. 

With these disputes regarding slave labor in mind, the question of power and exchange is an important one. For, unlike the worker, the slave is made free by abolition, not unionization. In the world of Sorry to Bother You, the power caller is collateral within a corporate gambit. And though Cash’s lack of integrity is put on full display as a warning against political cowards, little is done that can threaten the conditions that inspired such desperation in the first place. Despite all his posturing as a power caller, Cash ultimately lacks power, and thus, when he is faced with it, he is routinely outmatched. In the end, it is the world’s continued investment in and innovation of slavery that confines him regardless of his personal righteousness. For, as Frantz Fanon writes in Black Skin, White Masks, “The Negro is a slave who has been allowed to assume the attitude of a master. The white man is a master who has allowed his slaves to eat at his table.”