Mind Picker: The Sellout

The only certainties I had about the African-American condition were that we had no concept of the phrases “too sweet” and “too salty”. And in ten years, through countless Californian cruelties and slights against the blacks, the poor, the people of color, like Propositions 8 and 187, the disappearance of social welfare, David Cronenberg's Crash, and Dave Egger's do-gooder condescension, I hadn't spoken a single word. During roll call, Foy never called me by my given name, but simply yelled, “The Sellout!” Looked me in the face with a sly and perfunctory smile, said, “Here”, and placed a check mark next to my name.

The Sellout is a relentlessly in-your-face satirical examination of present day race relations in the US, written by and from the point-of-view of an African-American man, and while the state of the black community doesn't look too rosy, author Paul Beatty doesn't shy away from apportioning a big share of the blame to that community itself. The facts of the plot are totally over-the-top (the main character was raised as a Skinner/Piaget-style lab rat by his father [the founder and sole practitioner of Liberation Psychology]; they live on a farm in an agricultural-zoned ghetto within LA [where the main character is as likely to travel by horseback as by truck or bus]; there is slavery, the resegregation of buses, undesegregation of schools, the bimonthly meetings of outsider Oreo intellectuals at the Dum Dum Donut Shop), but as in the best work of Jonathon Swift, the absurd shines a piercing light on the actual. As a Canadian, I felt a bit like a Cultural Anthropologist examining an artefact from a remote society (and maybe I'm wrong when I assume that Americans will have a different reading experience than I did), and on every page, wrapped in humour, I found insightful observations that both delighted and provoked me: what more could a reader want? Mild spoilers to follow.

As The Sellout opens, the narrator – it takes a while to learn that his (nick)name is Bonbon Me; it isn't until the end we learn his father's name was F. K. Me – is appearing before the Supreme Court, charged with slavery and several other infractions against various articles of the Constitution. When the plot rewinds to the point where he acquires this slave – Hominy, the last surviving original member of the Little Rascals who, as Buckwheat's understudy, saw most of his own (totally over-the-top racist) scenes hit the cutting room floor – it's shown as a kindness to an old man who has lost his sense of self ever since their township of Dickens was erased from the maps of LA by greedy land speculators:

As long as I live, I'll never forget the sound of my leather belt against the Levi Strauss denim as I unsheathed it from my pants. The whistle of that brown-and-black reversible whip cutting through the air and raining down hard in loud skin-popping thunderclaps on Hominy's back. The teary-eyed joy and thankfulness he showed me as he crawled, not away from the beating, but into it; seeking closure for centuries of repressed anger and decades of unrequited subservience by hugging me at the knees and begging me to hit him harder, his black body welcoming the weight and sizzle of my whips with groans of ecstasy. I'll never forget Hominy bleeding in the street and, like every slave throughout history, refusing to press charges.

From here, Bonbon paints white boundary lines along the streets that mark the former limits of Dickens (which leads to the emergence of community pride), he amends the sign at the front of the local city bus to say “Priority seating for seniors, disabled, and whites” (and that bus becomes the safest in the city, with the best behaved commuters: It's the signs. People grouse at first, but the racism takes them back. Makes them humble. Makes them realize how far we've come, and, more important, how far we have to go), and across from the underfunded, underperforming public school, he builds a mock construction site for an all-white private academy and the Dickens students immediately begin outperforming on standardised tests (which, of course, makes white parents from the surrounding neighbourhoods demand to put their own children into what is now labelled a “No Whites” school). As a farmer, Bonbon recognises that good practise involves segregating his crops to give each “equal access to sunlight and water; we make sure every living organism has room to breathe”. There seems to be some sense to that, but this is where Bonbon gets arrested; as a constitutional challenge case if not serious criminal charges. As Bonbon puts it to the arresting officer:

“It’s illegal to yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater, right?”

“It is.”

“Well, I’ve whispered ‘Racism’ in a post-racial world.”

More random quotes (because I wanted to quote this whole book), on Bonbon's homeschooling:

In school, whenever I had to do something like memorize the periodic table, my father would say the key to doing boring tasks is to think about not so much what you're doing but the importance of why you're doing it. Though when I asked him if slavery wouldn't have been less psychologically damaging if they had thought of it as “gardening”, I got a vicious beating that would have make Kunta Kinte wince.

A typical self-deprecating joke:

If my sexual ineptitude was a problem, she never let on. She simply boxed my ears and worked my beached-whale carcass over like a Saturday-night wrestler looking for revenge in a grudge match I didn't want to end.

And what I figure is the point of The Sellout; the pinnacle in the evolution of the self-concept of the modern African-American:

Unmitigated Blackness is essays passing for fiction. It's the realization that there are no absolutes, except when there are. It's the acceptance of contradiction not being a sin and a crime but a human frailty like split ends and libertarianism.

Essays passing for fiction and having the nerve to talk about racism in a post-racial world, The Sellout uses satire in the most effective of ways: while not letting white America off the hook for its persistent (and persistently denied) racism, Beatty pokes at his own community and asks why they (from the dropouts and gangsters to those successful officials and intellectuals who are self-deluded if they believe acting like white people will force them to be accepted by white people), would ever give others a reason to look down on them.
It's a powerful novel, laugh-out-loud funny in places, and a fascinating, provocative read.