Peele-ing Back the Layers of Blackness

In honor of Drake mentioning Jordan Peele in his most recent single, I am finally going to post this piece I’ve been sitting on for a while. Enjoy!

The other night I spent a good 2 hours watching Key and Peele videos. Everybody and their mother has seen the incredible substitute teacher skit with the inner-city teacher dramatically mispronouncing common names. It’s overly quoted but it is still a comedic gem. I am one of those guys who champions himself on discovering something before it becomes popular (not sure why, it’s not really an accomplishment). I saw my first Key and Peele skit in 2013 and immediately binge watched the series. This was well before the show got popular. I feel like a lot of people don’t know there was an actual Key and Peele TV show. In the series Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key would perform monologues or stand-up routines in between some of the famous skits we all know and love today. Obviously the skits were hilarious, but I found the monologues even more enthralling. Not only were they funny, but Key and Peele used a lot of self-deprecating humor to illustrate their lives as bi-racial men. Needless to say I could relate to this show on a different level compared to my friends. It was almost as if these two went inside my head and put all my 7th grade internal confusion on TV. I cannot find the episode but in one monologue discussing the idea of “sounding black”, Jordan Peele said: “The black experience is not monolithic.” To many this may seem obvious. But to a twelve-year-old biracial kid living in an upper-class predominantly white neighborhood, these words were incredibly illuminating. Simple words, massive impact. For the first time I felt like I could really identify with somebody outside my family. I felt like he was talking directly to me. 

I’ve always struggled with my identity as a black man. Growing up I heard things like “You are the whitest black person” or “Yeah, but you’re not really black.” Because I didn’t look a certain way, or speak in a certain dialect, I couldn’t be “black.” As I’ve grown older I’ve learned this is a common experience for biracial people across the globe. It’s the ol’ too black for the white kids and too white for the black ones phenomenon. Key and Peele were able to express this conflict in hilarious fashion. I consider these two, Jordan Peele especially, to be artistic geniuses. I do not say that word lightly. Some of their skits were funny simply due to their absurdity. But some of them used race as the basis for their comedic creation in a way that hadn’t really been done before. Dave Chappelle championed this idea and I think Key & Peele honored him by putting their own twist on sketch comedy. I think I found it especially funny because if you know me you know a lot of my humor can be race-based. It’s obviously a defense mechanism but it’s also really funny at times. In no way am I comparing my sense of humor to that of Key and Peele’s, but the more I listen to them the more similarities I discover.

 It’s still difficult to articulate why I feel so represented in the show and connected with the two actors. However, as Peele does so brilliantly, he let his films do the talking for me. Another brilliant Jordan Peele creation is the film Get Out. Many people, black and white, have their own unique experiences with the film that I clearly cannot comment on. All I can describe is my own experience with the movie. The most impactful component for me was the idea of a “Sunken Place.” In the film our protagonist Chris spends the weekend surrounded by white people experiencing various covert insults and racist remarks. Eventually Chris realizes he has been lured by the family who intend to hijack his body. His girlfriend’s mother hypnotizes him and he enters the Sunken Place. This is where he falls through the floor watching his helpless body play victim to various traumatic experiences in his life. It is the white people in this space hijacking him and his blackness. For me the sunken place is an out of body experience I get being the only African-American in a room. But it’s not just being aware of this, it’s when somebody makes a remark that isolates you as a black man. I used to call it the spotlight effect but now the Sunken Place makes more sense. 

To give an example, I am sitting around a group of white people and somebody is telling a story. This person might say, “Yeah and after that this black guy came up to me etc.” That’s when it hits. This Black Guy. Why did he have to mention his race? If it were a white guy would he say “this white guy”? It’s that moment when everything around me stops and I am almost looking at myself outside of my body. At the moment my blackness becomes so obvious for me. It’s weird because my head begins to question, criticize, or ruminate, while everybody else continues as if nothing happened. The most common experience is when a song that contains nigga comes on, and I have the inevitable “are they going to say it” moment. Regardless, it’s a lose-lose situation. Either they don’t say it and there’s an awkward pause between lyrics, or they do say it and my discomfort escalates. Then I am left with two options: I can say something and be the angry black guy who apparently “makes everything about race” or I can shut my mouth and internalize it. Guess which one I opt for? All in all my experience as a black man was often defined by other people. If I do not fit the rigid, stereotypical conception of what someone considers “black” then I simply could not be that. I put a lot of stock into African-American male role models. I tend to obsess and emulate people I look up to (i.e. playing Obama in a school play, or doing every dance Odell Beckham Jr. has ever done). I’d say 20% of my love for Drake stems from him being on top of the rap game as a biracial individual. Thankfully I was exposed to Jordan Peele who I did not necessarily need to emulate. Instead he was just an acknowledgement that I was not alone. Through his skits and movies I found out all the confusion in my head is normal. Because of Key and Peele I almost felt allowed to be “black.”