As I sat in a darkened midtown theater in late February, watching Peele put a name to a shape and color of evil I’d encountered before, I remember thinking: Yes, that’s it.

I don’t know if Peele’s film will trigger a real and needed shift in Hollywood, if it will open up more doors for more inclusive stories to be told, or if white people actually confronted their demons in the months since, but I do know the feeling the film left me with, the feeling of acknowledgement, Peele’s knowing head nod. The genius of Get Out, framed as it was in a more psychologically perverse vision of Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, was its insistence on airing what many black people have long known to be true-just how draining white people can be on our existence, sometimes quite literally. Still, our America-the one that gives rise to plutocratic womanizers, the one that fetishizes the death of black men and women, the one that has done its very best to gut the middle class and believes in lawless gun control despite a continuous wave of mass shootings-makes it easy to hide a particular kind of evil (or just as easy to broadcast it). Evil has always lived in the open here, in the land of the free. For one to properly discuss even the bare essentials of Get Out, Jordan Peele’s social thriller about a white and seemingly liberal family that, secretly and for generations, has lobotomized black people, one must make peace with an obvious truth: white evil has always been a characteristic of American life, from the earliest days of colonization, when the blood of slaves first dampened U.S.

Best movies 2017 list