The Sellout

by Paul Beatty

eventually, like all lower-middle-class Californians, I’d die in the same bedroom I’d grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that’ve been there since the ’68 quake.

No, what little inspiration I have in life comes not from any sense of racial pride. It stems from the same age-old yearning that has produced great presidents and great pretenders, birthed captains of industry and captains of football; that Oedipal yen that makes men do all sorts of shit we’d rather not do, like try out for basketball and fistfight the kid next door because in this family we don’t start shit but we damn sure finish it. I speak only of that most basic of needs, the child’s need to please the father.

I think about all the lines of ad infinitum bullshit my father shoveled down my throat, until his dreams became my dreams.

That’s the problem with history, we like to think it’s a book—that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn’t the paper it’s printed on. It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.

Here, in America, “integration” can be a cover-up. “I’m not racist. My prom date, second cousin, my president is black (or whatever).” The problem is that we don’t know whether integration is a natural or an unnatural state. Is integration, forced or otherwise, social entropy or social order?

I seriously doubt that some slave ship ancestor, in those idle moments between being raped and beaten, was standing knee-deep in their own feces rationalizing that, in the end, the generations of murder, unbearable pain and suffering, mental anguish, and rampant disease will all be worth it because someday my great-great-great-great-grandson will have Wi-Fi, no matter how slow and intermittent the signal is.

The black experience used to come with lots of bullshit, but at least there was some fucking privacy. Our slang and debased fashion sense didn’t cross over until years after the fact. We even had our own set of top-secret sex techniques. A Negro kama sutra that got passed down on the playground, the stoop, and by drunken parents intentionally leaving the door open just a crack so “the little niggers might learn something.” But the Internet proliferation of black pornography has given anybody with a twenty-five-dollar-a-month membership pass, or a lack of regard for intellectual property rights, access to our once-idiosyncratic sexual techniques. And now, not just white women, but women of all creeds, colors, and sexual orientations, have to suffer through their partners humping them at a mile a minute and yelling, “Who owns the pussy?” every two strokes. And even though they’ve never fully appreciated Basquiat, Kathleen Battle, and Patrick Ewing—and still haven’t discovered Killer of Sheep, Lee Morgan, talcum powder, Fran Ross, or Johnny Otis—these days mainstream America’s nose is all up in our business, and I knew eventually I was fucking going to jail.

The only people discussing “race” with any insight and courage are loud middle-aged white men who romanticize the Kennedys and Motown, well-read open-minded white kids like the tie-dyed familiar sitting next to me in the Free Tibet and Boba Fett T-shirt, a few freelance journalists in Detroit, and the American hikikomori who sit in their basements pounding away at their keyboards composing measured and well-thought-out responses to the endless torrent of racist online commentary.