Now, This Is a Story All About How My Life Got Flipped Turned Upside-Down

In The White Boy Shuffle, Mrs. Kaufman's decision to move the family from sunny Santa Monica to the hellish Hillside always struck me as odd, but I couldn't quite pin down why. She gives a reasonable enough explanation; the kids are being raised very similarly to Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God, in which we can see problems arising from African-Americans being raised outside of their culture. Logan says at one point that Janie's refusal to work is a sign of how she was spoiled, and needed to bring herself down from her high chair. Ostensibly, this is what Mrs. Kaufman fears in Gunnar and the girls; she wants them to experience the full meaning of being black in America, and that means moving to the ghetto. But, still it strikes a strange chord, like something wasn't right in moving from the nice neighbourhood to the run-down one. But, I pushed it to the back of my head, thinking that this was merely a show of my naivete, in that everybody should always aspire to be like me and live the way I do.

It was some time later that it finally dawned on me why precisely the move seemed so precisely bizarre. The truth is, Beatty is inverting the somewhat common trope of "the one who made it out," where generally speaking a character leaves a place that others don't particularly want to live in but don't leave for family or lack of money. That is, the character moves out of the ghetto into some nicer place (a more lucrative job, college, suburbia, whatever). Will in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is a good example of this; his mom sends him to live with his rich uncle and aunt in a nice California neighbourhood after he gets in a fight with some gangsters in Philadelphia. Another example would be the Freemans in The Boondocks, who move from Chicago to Woodcrest, the epitome of white suburbia. Even Bigger Thomas does this to a degree in Native Son: although he neither moves out of the south side of Chicago nor leave it at all, he still takes a job in affluent Hyde Park as a chauffeur rather than something "on the wrong side of the tracks," presumably like his old job as a commercial driver.

So, why specifically is Gunnar going against the grain here? What is Beatty trying to say by thrusting Gunnar the opposite direction of how this is "supposed to go"? In a sense, it almost seems like he's condemning those who leave the ghetto for bigger and better places. Gunnar is the model of success within his new home; despite a rough start, he eventually makes friends with Scoby, becomes a great poet, and discovers his basketball ability. He wouldn't have done any of these things in Santa Monica; in fact, nothing about his younger years there contribute positively to these occurrences. He earns the respect of Scoby by loudly throwing away the traditionally "right" thing to do (deliver his monologue perfectly) and by embracing his new home (interspersing his new speech with phrases indigenous to Hillside). He begins to think about poetry right after this, and largely as a consequence of this -- his invented monologue is very much a vision of what's to come in his poems. Moreover, the informational background that Gunnar has for his poems isn't something he learned in any school; he's shown to be very auto-didactic, reading old classics in his tent in the department store. And his basketball ability seems to be raw talent; he'd never even played before Hillside, only learning the rules. Back in Santa Monica, he didn't really have anything comparable to his successes in Hillside; he had friends, but they weren't like Scoby. None of them were black, and Gunnar at some points keeps his interests in people like the Tuskegee airmen hidden because it wouldn't seem as cool as the fact that Hitler was missing a testicle. His actions amounted to mere hooliganry in Santa Monica, while Hillside at least had seriously positive moments. Beatty later more conclusively points out how unwelcome black people seem to be in the nicer neighbourhoods with the Harvard recruiter, who claims Hillside and its residents (not realizing Gunnar lives there) to be irredeemable in its awfulness. The white crowds boo Scoby and Gunnar during their games playing for Boston University, while "all of Harlem" comes to see them and cheer them on against Columbia. It certainly fits with the theme of the novel, that these were times so difficult and heavy for African-Americans that they were better off killing themselves than going on trying to live. This strengthening of the idea in the novel that black people who leave their assigned place are doomed to suffer the consequences certainly bodes badly for general race relations. And, the inversion of a common trope brings the reader's attention to this issue subconsciously, such that you hardly notice its very real effect.

The Murder of Nicholas Scoby

Gunnar Kaufman is either the most naive person on the planet Earth or the worst friend there. Let me explain. All of the hints were there. Scoby nearly tells him outright what he plans to do. But Gunnar, the fool that he is, doesn't seem to get the fact that Scoby is about to kill himself. Scoby calls himself the forty-eighth ronin and makes several references to suicide. He asks Gunnar if he's serious about riling everybody up to off themselves. He explicitly asks whether or not you need a permit to kill yourself (notwithstanding the obvious difficulties of enforcing such a permit). He even tells Gunnar where he plans to jump by asking where the tallest building around is. So why doesn't Gunnar do anything?

Gunnar elsewhere says about the people who are killing themselves in his honor, "But I don't feel responsible for anything anyone else does. I have enough trouble being responsible for myself" (201). Certainly, he's not putting the gun into anybody's hand; he's not holding their family hostage to force them to kill themselves. But, to say that he is not responsible at all is ridiculous. The man is actively inciting others to commit suicide; he dares them to write poems before they go to be more memorable. Innocence here would be to say nothing. Innocence here would under no condition be to triple dog dare everybody to stab themselves and sign his name in their blood with the poem.

But why doesn't Gunnar even think about saving Scoby? It's not like he's willing himself to die; despite talk about taking away the satisfaction of killing him from the government or whoever, he doesn't commit suicide but instead challenges them directly to come and kill him, going against what he explicitly tells Psycho Loco he won't do: "So it's useless for an enemy to challenge you, right? ... Might as well kill myself, right? Why give you the satisfaction" (226). His only reaction after Scoby's talk about suicide and even his actual death is to take notes for a poem and to wonder what noise his body made as it hit the pavement. All Scoby can rouse out of Gunnar is unhappiness that there wasn't a glory to accompany Gunnar's pitiful Brocken specter as he sat at the top of the law building.

The truth is, Gunnar is a huge chicken. He's letting everyone down by not even killing himself, just going through the motions of life. Depression is a funny thing; it's not entirely household knowledge, but antidepressants unexpectedly raise a patient's rate of suicide. This may seem absurd, but the reason is surprisingly simple: those who are depressed don't always even have the emotional strength to consider offing themselves. The drugs make things just good enough that this option returns to the table. It's certainly possible that Gunnar is now very seriously depressed. He doesn't like playing basketball anymore, dismissing the idea that his "purpose in life is to make these free throws, then run back and play defense" (190). At his South Africa speech, he says, "Matter of fact, I ain't ready to die for anything, so I guess I'm just not fit to live. In other words, I'm just ready to die. I'm just ready to die" (200).

Yet even though he goes to such length to describe how he wants to die, there's no sign he's actively trying to kill himself. For an unafflicted reader, depression isn't a compelling enough reason to feel sympathy when the patient is still encouraging others to do the thing he can't. Refusing to talk to Scoby seriously when he most needed it doomed him to death. But, Gunnar still comes out alive, and that's more than he seems to deserve by the end of the novel.

Robert Freeman Is the Greatest Civil Rights Leader that Never Existed

The Boondocks Intro Theme - Asheru

I am the stone that the builder refused;
I am the visual,
The inspiration,
That made lady sing the blues.

I'm the spark that makes your idea bright,
The same spark
That lights the dark
So that you can know your left from your right.

I am the ballot in your box ,
The bullet in the gun,
The inner glow that lets you know
To call your brother son,
The story that just begun,
The promise of what's to come,
And Imma remain a soldier till the war is won. 

It's not hard to see how The Boondocks is in many ways similar to Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle. Both serve as contemporary commentaries on African-American life, from the more general -- Gunnar hated "fried chicken even before I knew I was supposed to like it" (35) while Huey becomes sick from watching too much BET ("Riley Wuz Here") -- to the uncharacteristically specific -- the LA riots for Gunnar and the ballad of Latarian Milton (or, his parody name for the show, Lamilton Taeshawn ["Smokin' with Cigarettes"]). But, the two stories' protagonists have very different responses to the difficulties that still persist for African-Americans today, as can be seen merely from the show's opening theme.

It's not hard to see the builder's refusal (racism) in Gunnar's life. His own father beats him, saying, "You are not a Kaufman. I refuse to let you embarass me" (137). The poetry class at BU can't let him be just a poet: "Well, it's really you. I thought that if I mentioned a black poet, I wouldn't be taken seriously by the rest of the class" (179). And while both Huey and Gunnar aren't exactly the visual of abject poverty that could be conjured (Huey lives in white suburban Woodcrest and Gunnar is the model of success with his poetry books and basketball victories), they still come together to be a spark to action. Their main differences can be defined by this action. Gunnar uses his fame and power to convince black people everywhere to kill themselves in defiance of the white man. Huey, on the other hand, was cut off from African-American society when the Freemans moved from Chicago to suburbia, and his efforts tend to amount to little, like in "The Block is Hot" where he only musters white people who sympathize with his ideals but won't actually do anything to come protest.

Yet, despite Gunnar's obvious advantage in raising forces to do his bidding, as far as aiding African-Americans goes, Huey is a much more compelling character. Unlike Gunnar, he still believes "the promise of what's to come," and fights for it. Gunnar sits around daring the government to kill him. He won't even match the efforts of those he convinces to commit suicide; the government will have to do that job for him. There's no willingness to commit to anything; Gunnar has just become too apathetic to do anything beyond what he immediately needs to in order to keep himself and his family alive to their death by A-bomb. In his defense, he says, "So it's useless for an enemy to challenge you, right? ... Might as well kill myself, right? Why give you the satisfaction" (226). But the problem with that statement is that he very clearly is challenging the government, is giving them the satisfaction because he refuses to actually stand up for what he believes in like he's convinced everyone else to and kill himself. Huey, on the other hand, puts himself on the front lines, calling in weird, random blackmail threats to save unjustly imprisoned black people ("The Passion of Reverend Ruckus"). In fact, the only reason Huey doesn't go to the jail himself to bust the man out is he couldn't get a ride there; he even acknowledges that he would probably die in the process, but says that the cause is worth it. In comparison, Gunnar seems like he's given up even trying to make a statement and won't even commit suicide for fear it would make too big a wave.