Tunneling: In “Us,” Jordan Peele Mines the Horror of American Science
Posted on the original blog on March 24th, 2019.
Today, the novel coronavirus infected 40,000 Americans. The pandemic has exposed our current leadership’s deficient attitude toward science, which made me reach back to this older piece.
I loved “Get Out” and “Us,” and how Jordan Peele found the horror that exists in Black America’s relationship with science. My nation is so willing to believe racial justifications for why Covid-19 kills more Black and brown people, yet is unwillingly to accept the life-saving science of wearing a mask. As with all things American, I believe examining Black personhood and slavery explains things best.
Deep within the tunnels that lead to our nation’s past, Jordan Peele continues to expand on the horror show that American science has been for Black folk.
“Us” tells the story of an uprising of clones called the Tethered. The United States created these doubles. However, the Tethered lacked souls of their own, having to share it with the genetic original. The originals lived in the sun. The subterranean duplicates enacted a shadow life, listlessly and miserably copying the dancing, eating, lovemaking, and daily routines of the originators. The movie concerns itself with Adelaide Wilson and her family confronting their Tethered counterparts on their day of uprising — the moment of reckoning for the United States’ unethical science experiment.
In his previous film, Peele also used science as his source of horror. The protagonist, Chris, ultimately has to fight for his freedom against a white liberal family who specialized in transferring the consciousnesses of elderly white people into prime Black bodies. Critics alike praised and analyzed the film for its social commentary. Most said little about the fantastical, speculative science at play.
Science has been the enemy of Black folk in Peele’s cinematic oeuvre. As a field, science is supposed to study the composition of consciousness around us in a way to unify everything. We are all, at our cores, luminous beings of light made up of matter, atoms, chemicals, and organs that are consistent among all skin hues and tones. White supremacy has historically used science to rend political, social, and economic gaps between whites and Blacks. Peele’s work exposes the relationship that has always existed between American science and Black personhood. It has been exploitative. It has been false toward science’s ontological aims.
In the 19th Century, white people increasingly used science to justify the nation’s original sin of slavery. The Victorian pseudoscience of phrenology made its way over to the United States, and enslavers quickly used their head models and clamps to claim that Black folk was deficient in all manners of mental complexity and regulation that white people allegedly demonstrated. Doctors forcibly extracted gynecology’s first advancements from the vaginas and uteri of enslaved women. Enslavers developed standard practices on how to feed slaves and how to breed them, with minute scientific observations; to the inch, the milliliter, to the pound, to the kilogram, do this and you have will a tortured workforce that will maximize your crop yield and harvest. Sinners used science to justify their sins.
Such attitudes persisted after emancipation. Since 1865, Black Americans had to endure the rise of scientific racism. Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race influenced racial attitudes; though it dealt with the surge of southern and eastern European immigration, his studies on population in cities also raised the alarm about rising Black birth rates. The pseudoscience of eugenics supplanted the actual science of heredity and genetics, becoming a source of sustained academic studies in universities and colleges across the land. Such dubious science all occurred on the backdrop of the Long Night, the period between Reconstruction’s failure and the Civil Rights Movement, which saw lynchings, violence against Blacks, the entrenched segregation of northern cities, disenfranchisement, and rampant discrimination.
Within this context and pseudoscientific justification, America continued to see Black bodies as a petri dish. The Tuskegee syphilis experiment is simply the most prominent, where scientists denied treatment to Black men who were infected with syphilis to trace its pathology (dying from syphilis is a ghastly death). American science also pilfered Henriatta Lacks’ body for her medically-important cells. And throughout the land, white supremacy refused the medical advances of the 20th Century to Blacks via segregated hospitals and underserved public resources.
Modern studies now reveal how centuries of scientific malpractice impact Black personhood. Epigenetics, the branch of genetics that studies changes in gene behavior (different from gene mutations, which is an evolutionary change in a species’ DNA), shows that Black people have internalized the pains of our ancestors. Our higher incidences of high blood pressure, death in childbirth, and other chronic conditions can partly be linked to that it has always been this way for us. The allostatic stress that science has imposed on my people has created a debt that our politicians and doctors still insist are our fault. In my adopted home state, the proposed solution has been to deny food stamps and medical care to the poor, who are disproportionally Black. And in the medical field, it has led to the underdiagnosis of Black folk, and the disregard of Black pain on the doctor’s table.
Peele had the rich folklore of Black people to tap into when crafting the scientific horrors of “Us” and “Get Out.” White supremacy can inflict far more pain than some demon with long claws and a taste for childish music. His genius is pointing toward the result of such scientific maltreatment.
White supremacy is the current ultimate expression of political power in the world, and power always believes that what is good for the goose is good for the gander. When the Tethered finally arose, it was not merely to harass Adelaide and her family. Everyone, despite not being involved, was implicated and ceremonially killed with golden scissors. The horror of science is that its ontological endpoint is the unification of all humanity and existence under inviolable laws. None will be spared the consequences of abused science and its findings.
The air pollution that caused families to become asthmatic in the poorer neighborhoods in New York City is now causing the world to burn. As the recent tragedy in New Zealand shows, the pseudoscientific racism that justified the poor treatments of Blacks is now a global product, causing displacement, migration, massacres, and murders of various other peoples who form the “others” in their national polity. The fight for adequate health care that Black folk carried for centuries is still, in this nation, an open point of debate for all Americans. Who deserves to have our science heal us?
Peele’s creative vision continues to unearth the truth behind the folklore that American science has tried to keep buried. What should be a healing force is often deployed as an adversary toward Black personhood. In a world that is increasingly becoming digitalized, we need an auteur who reminds citizens that your science might have a problem with Black people. We are living through it now, and we can only hope Peele’s future work continues to remind us.