“White Girls, They Get You Every Time”: Get Out’s Horror of Miscegenation and Its Conception of the Black Bro’mance

©2023 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois miDway through Get Out ( JorDan Peele, 2017), the only reliably Black woman character, Detective Latoya (Erika Alexander), announces the conviction that I have appropriated for the first part of this article’s title. In full possession of her Blackness—because unlike Georgina (Betty Gabriel), the other Black woman figure in the film, she has not been body-snatched and psychically invaded by a member of the predatory white Coagula Order—Detective Latoya assesses the situation after listening briefly to Rod’s (Lil Rel Howrey) fearful theory that his best friend’s white girlfriend is responsible for his sudden and unexplained disappearance.1 Although the remark is offered with wry amusement at Rod’s agitation (and is heard by the audience after the movie has already dramatized the Coagula’s violation of two Black men who have been entangled in sexual relationships with white women), Detective Latoya articulates the central horror of Peele’s directorial debut: that the romantic and erotic space of the contemporary heterosexual interracial romance is a site of Black male wounding and destruction and is therefore one more weapon in the ever-expanding arsenal of those committed to the (re)entrenchment of white dominance and Black dispossession in the post–civil rights era. Get Out’s deployment of the detective serves at least two functions. First, as another Black person, she corroborates Rod’s movielong skepticism about his friend’s involvement with a white woman, thereby configuring a broader Black communal guardedness toward such relationships. Second, given Detective Latoya’s role as a representative of the law, her mockery of Rod’s anxieties about Black psychological entrapment and sexual enslavement, as well as her refusal to utilize the police department’s resources in order to assist Rod in Chris’s (Daniel Kaluuya) rescue, signals the film’s proposition that Black liberation will be effected in spite of the state, not because of it.2 Get Out argues that this is especially the case if the Black people accorded some measure of authority disregard historically informed, generationally transmitted communal knowing in favor of the United States’ official narrative of already-achieved Black emancipation and racial parity. Within moments, Detective Latoya disavows her own utterance about white women’s threat, because Rod’s elaborated fears fundamentally challenge her own status as a representative of white law and the presumed racial progress to which her professional role attests. Her destabilization is so profound that she seeks the reassurance of two fellow officers of color who, joining her as a unit, uproariously dismiss Rod’s allegations of white deception, interracial abduction, and coerced sexual relations as symptoms of lunacy and racial paranoia. For the police, it is more comforting to deride the messenger than “White Girls, They Get You Every Time”: Get Out’s Horror of Miscegenation and Its Conception of the Black Bro’mance