The new beautiful Jordan Peele movie “US” is about so many things- from false borders to charity industrial complexes to parenting to colonial borders, detention centers and the plantation prison nation all the way through embedded with Christian biblical doomsday allegories, Indigenous iconography and wite-science. But first and foremost its about the horror movie called Life, the horror of not “seeing” each other- the horror of what I call “the violent act of looking away,” the horrific implications of not seeing our fellow humans from all sides of false kkkolonizer borders, abilities, classes and places as the same as “US”.
And like Jordon Peele has said and shown many times in his powerful-beautiful-revolutionary work, the horror “genre” is a perfect container because so much of so-called real life is horrific.
“Who are you?, “ said the “real people” to what was loosely referred to as the “shadow people” at one point in the movie..
“We are Americans”, the shadow version of the protagonist played by Lupita Nyong’o replied. In this one line, one of many competing plot points of the movie were revealed as well as a transparent and subtle hilarious critique of the amerikkklan nightmare, aka “dream” and the coinciding myth of place, region, migration across mama earth and the falsehood of kkkolonizer borders in the US aka the United Snakes of amerikkka
As a formerly houseless poverty skola and poor single mama who was jailed for 3 months for the act of being homeless with my mama and has struggled with “outsider” status all of my life, I also felt this movie was about the way that unhoused folks are “seen” or rather never seen, our bodies and lives and mere presence is criminalized, is an “interruption” and/or scary to all the housed versions of “US” in the U.S..
And then even deeper and crazier was a critique of the Charity (Savior) Industrial complex, movements like “Save the Child” and Red Cross, with the integration of the “Hands Across America” being the organizing “target” for the shadow peoples resistance.
My brother in POOR Magazine, race, poverty and disability skola and co-founder of Homefulness and Krip Hop Nation tells me that disabled, wite organizers had a problem with the issue of the "shadow" peoples inability to speak, which both he and i think is idiotic, as their inablity to "speak" aka be heard is the exact thing that happens to all of US silenced, incarcerated, bordered, houseless, indigenous peoples. In fact, our voices are NEVER heard speaking for ourselves, we are spoken about us without us, we are talked about, not talked with, and our bodies, lives and communities are contained and terrorized, by the "horror" stories told about us without us.
And lastly and perhaps most importantly, the movie is a critique of wite-science itself - the way U.S. people put their ancestral knowledge, their eldership principals and their own basic common sense away, deep into the dark recesses of their consciousness in order to lift up, believe up, give up and ascend to middle-class-ness, to nuclear family life, to bizarre and harmful science and “solutions” to our problems.
Finally, I would recommend this “horror” movie, which wasn’t any scarier for US poverty skolaz than “real” life. US, who are always outside your “safe” homes”, on the margins, experimented on, in jail, incarcerated, criminalized, profiled, lied about, hidden, and savior-ed everyday in amerikkka, but more for other people ascending to wite-ness, to middle-class othering, to the “away nation” as we teach in the new book Poverty Scholarship- Poor people-led Theory, Art, Words and Tears Across Mama Earth, who have drunk gallons of the US cool-AID that kkkolonizer borders are ok, that wealth-hoarding and land -occupying and the cult of independence are the things to aspire to and that any of US are any different than any of US.
(PS- If Jordon Peele reads this.Leroy and Tiny from.POOR Magazine family wants to collaborate with you….. )