By: Max Morant (’23), Staff Writer
At this point, we’ve all heard of Jordan Peele. His work has captivated millions and taken strides to represent the Black experience in America. In 2017, he brought us Get Out,a master commentary on the covert racism of white liberals. The movie’s metaphorical “sunken place” has become a staple with a wide range of interpretations, but nearly all of them reflect the suffocating and often overwhelming feeling of Black people living in a society designed to exploit them. Two years later, he dropped Us, another critically acclaimed “social thriller” that Black Ink will be giving the spotlight for Halloween. In anticipation of this haunting holiday, we’ll take a look at the man behind it all.
Jordan Peele was born to a white mother and Black father on February 21, 1979, in New York City. Lucinda Williams, his mother, raised Peele in a small apartment on the Upper Westside. His father was mostly absent before passing away in 1999. Peele attended a progressive, co-educational institution known as the Calhoun School until 12th grade before matriculating to Sarah Lawrence College to study puppetry. While on campus, Peele formed an improvisational comedy group known as ‘Judith’ with some of his classmates. After his sophomore year, he left Sarah Lawrence to pursue a bigger platform and eventually landed a role for MADtv, where he remained for five years.
In 2008, toward the end of his stint at MADtv, many asserted that America entered a post-racial era with Obama’s election. These claims motivated Peele’s mission of revealing racism’s pervasiveness in the country, even with a Black president. He also met Keegan-Michael Key as a colleague with MADtv, before beginning their eponymous show in 2012.
In the same year as Key & Peele’s premiere, Peele founded a production company known as Monkeypaw Productions, dedicated to furthering discussion surrounding America’s social issues through creative storytelling and visual art. Some of the company’s work includes Lovecraft Country, Blackkklansman, and Candyman (2021). Each of these works, set in different eras, provides thought-provoking questions and commentary about society and its continued injustices against the Black community. Monkeypaw Productions has allowed Peele to expand his endeavor to unpack contemporary societal issues to other Black artists with essential perspectives to contribute.
Jordan Peele’s career took off when people naively asserted that racism was a thing of the past and removed that thin veil to show just how resilient the scourge of oppression is. He has pioneered for the Black community by advocating with laughter, fear, and everything in between. He has parlayed that ability into providing a platform for other creatives to tell their own stories on their own terms. I cannot overstate his work’s positive impact on the articulation of underrepresented experiences.
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/peele-jordan-1979/
