The Sellout

by Paul Beatty

“What goes around, comes around … Quod circumvehitur, revehitur.”

In the distance, hurtling away from me like some distant spiral galaxy, the red and blue sirens spun silently but brilliantly, lighting up the mist of the morning marine layer like some inner-city aurora borealis.

Now, if I had my druthers, I couldn’t care less about being black. To this day, when the census form arrives in the mail, under the “RACE” question I check the box marked “Some other race” and proudly write in “Californian.”

Since he had arrived thirty-five minutes late and dead, the meeting was already in progress,

There’s something tranquil, almost monastic, about the inner-city donut shop.

Motherfuckers from Harvard to Harlem respect the Pew Research Center,

given my father’s wrongful death at the hands of the police, and the $2 million settlement I’d later received, in a sense he and I bought the farm on the same day.

Cotton was the worst.

Try learning to crawl, ride a tricycle, cover both eyes while playing peek-a-boo, and constructing a meaningful theory of mind, all with one hand.

I’m squeamishly shrill and possess all the speaking gravitas of the “shiest” member of your favorite boy band.

who after years doing heads, still knows only one hairstyle—fried, dyed, and laid to the side—

But under my watch people tend to snap on Wednesday. Hump day.

Take his rightful place in the wisecracking pantheon of Farina, Stymie, and Buckwheat,

Needless to say, there’s an anger to Hominy.

At 4,084 square miles, much of Los Angeles County, like the ocean floor, remains in large part unexplored.

During roll call Foy never called me by my proper name, but simply yelled, “The Sellout!”

And while I hadn’t quite reestablished Dickens, I had managed to quarantine it.

Maybe Rosa Parks didn’t give up her seat because she knew the guy to be unapologetically gassy or one of those annoying people who insists on asking what you’re reading, then without prompting tells you what he’s reading,

maybe Rosa Parks, after the arrest, the endless church rallies, and all the press, had to cry racism, because what was she going to say: “I refused to move because the man asked me what I was reading”? Negroes would’ve lynched her.

If New York is the City That Never Sleeps, then Los Angeles is the City That’s Always Passed Out on the Couch.

Godard approached filmmaking as criticism, the same way Marpessa approached bus driving,

“So you’re near the ocean?” “Yes, an ocean of sorrow.”

“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. On that bus it’s like the specter of segregation has brought Dickens together.”

Look, we’ve tried everything: smaller classrooms, longer hours, bilingual, monolingual, and sublingual educations, Ebonics, phonics, and hypnotics.

Apartheid united black South Africa, why couldn’t it do the same for Dickens?

Made me realize that for many people integration is a finite concept. Here, in America, “integration” can be a cover-up.

It would be the opposite of white flight, he said. “The Ku Klux influx.”

I hate when people get all folksy around black people they think they’re superior to. What was next? Fixin’? Sho’ ’nuff? A chorus of “Who Let the Dogs Out”?

Whistling is one of the few things you learn at public school.

L.A. is a mind-numbingly racially segregated city. But the epicenter of social apartheid is the stand-up comedy scene.

The setting for the joke is a licensed establishment where alcohol is served. No, wait. It’s a plane. I’m sorry, my mistake. They are going parachuting.”

I’m a farmer: we segregate in an effort to give every tree, every plant,

a chance for equal access to sunlight and water; we make sure every living organism has room to breathe.

To the whitest music we could think of (Madonna, The Clash, and Hootie & the Blowfish),

Hominy and I painted the words The Bessie Smith Trauma Center in thick, drippy, blood-red horror-movie-poster letters on what was until then a nameless glass-door emergency entrance to King Hospital.

Look up Bessie Smith and weep…

Sometimes I forget how funny Hominy is. Back in the day, to avoid the succession of booby traps laid by the white man, black people had to constantly be thinking on their feet.

Shit, one day of being black in the forties was equal to three hundred years of improv training with the Groundlings and Second City.

“Remember those photos of the black president and his family walking across the White House lawn arm-in-arm. Within those fucking frames at that instant, and in only that instant, there’s no fucking racism.”

If he was indeed an “autodidact,” there’s no doubt he had the world’s shittiest teacher.

He said people mistake suicide, murder, lap band surgery, interracial marriage, and overtipping for closure, when in reality what they’ve achieved is erasure.

Can I get you anything in the meantime?” “Closure.” “I don’t think you’ll need stitches.

“Did you really whip him?” “Not directly. I pay some people … It’s a long story.”

The California attorney general, flown in from Sacramento just to prosecute my case, leaped to her Prada-shod feet.

And future VP!

And while no one in this room would deny the basic premise of ‘civil rights,’ we’d argue forever and a day about what constitutes ‘equal treatment under the law’ as defined by the very articles of the Constitution this defendant is accused of violating. In attempting to restore his community through reintroducing precepts, namely segregation and slavery, that, given his cultural history, have come to define his community despite the supposed unconstitutionality and nonexistence of these concepts, he’s pointed out a fundamental flaw in how we as Americans claim we see equality.

I don’t know if what he’s done is legal or not, but the one civil right I can guarantee this defendant is the right to due process, the right to a speedy trial. We convene tomorrow morning at nine. But buckle up, people, no matter the verdict, innocent or guilty, this is going to the Supreme Court, so I hope you ain’t got nothing scheduled for the next five years. Bail is set”—Judge Nguyen took a big bite out the nectarine, then kissed his crucifix—“Bail is set at a cantaloupe and two kumquats.”

My bulbous nose and gigantic ears protrude from my bald Mount Fuji–shaped head like fleshy anemometers.

And at a minimum, this case suggests we ask ourselves not if separate were indeed equal, but what about ‘separate and not quite equal, but infinitely better off than ever before.’

There should be a Stage IV of black identity—Unmitigated Blackness.

Unmitigated Blackness is essays passing for fiction.

Unmitigated Blackness is coming to the realization that as fucked up and meaningless as it all is, sometimes it’s the nihilism that makes life worth living.