The Sellout

by Paul Beatty

I didn’t realize it then, but Hominy, like any other child star still standing in the klieg light afterglow of a long-ago canceled career, was bat-shit crazy.

It was hard to determine if he’d been turned into a real monkey or if Hal Roach Studios, never known for its extravagant special effects, just opened up the timeless cookbook of Classic American Stereotyping and turned to the one-step recipe for Negro Monkeyshines: 1. Just add tail.

Nancy Chodorow aloud: “Mothers are women, of course, because a mother is a female parent … We can talk about a man ‘mothering’ a child, if he is this child’s primary nurturing figure, or is acting in a nurturant manner. But we would never talk about a woman ‘fathering’ a child.”

There was only that minstrel smile, pearly white, wide and servile, beaming blankly back at me. It’s crazy how, in a way, child actors never seem to age. There’s always one feature that refuses to grow old and marks them forever young, if not forgotten. Think Gary Coleman’s cheeks, Shirley Temple’s pug nose, Eddie Munster’s widow’s peak, Brooke Shields’s flat-chestedness, and Hominy Jenkins’s effervescent smile.

He said that the vast majority of slave revolts took place on Wednesdays because traditionally Thursday was whippin’ day. The New York Slave Revolt, the L.A. riots, the Amistad, all them shits,” Hominy said, grinning woodenly from ear to ear like a ventriloquist’s dummy. “Been this way ever since we first set foot in this country. Someone’s getting whipped or stopped and frisked, whether or not anyone done anything wrong. So why not make it worthwhile and act a fool Wednesday if you gonna get beat on Thursday, right, massa?”

“sometimes we just have to accept who we are and act accordingly. I’m a slave. That’s who I am. It’s the role I was born to play. A slave who just also happens to be an actor. But being black ain’t method acting. Lee Strasberg could teach you how to be a tree, but he couldn’t teach you how to be a nigger. This is the ultimate nexus between craft and purpose, and we won’t be discussing this again. I’m your nigger for life, and that’s it.”

“I’d whisper that you’re thinking too small. That saving Dickens nigger by nigger with a bullhorn ain’t never going to work. That you have to think bigger than your father did. You know the phrase ‘You can’t see the forest for the trees’?” “Of course.” “Well, you have to stop seeing us as individuals, ’cause right now, massa, you ain’t seeing the plantation for the niggers.”

true freedom is having the right to be a slave.” He hiked up his pants and slipped into his Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer plantationese. “I know taint nobody forcin’ me, but dis here one slave you ain’t never gwine be rid of. Freedom can kiss my postbellum black ass.”

The myth is that the Little Rascals, like a production of Macbeth, are cursed, that they all died horribly premature deaths.

And this country, the latent high school homosexual that it is, the mulatto passing for white that it is, the Neanderthal incessantly plucking its unibrow that it is, needs people like him. It needs somebody to throw baseballs at, to fag-bash, to nigger-stomp, to invade, to embargo. Anything that, like baseball, keeps a country that’s constantly preening in the mirror from actually looking in the mirror and remembering where the bodies are buried.

And what are cities really, besides signs and arbitrary boundaries?

At 4,084 square miles, much of Los Angeles County, like the ocean floor, remains in large part unexplored. Even though you needed an advanced degree in geomatics to understand its 800+ pages, The Thomas Guide to Los Angeles County is the spiral-bound Sacagawea for any intrepid explorer trying to navigate this urban oasis-less sprawl.

If I ever raise the nerve, one day I’m going to erect two more signs. So if you find yourself hurtling southbound on the 110 freeway, speeding past two yellow-and-black blurs that read WATCH OUT FOR FALLING HOME PRICES and CAUTION—BLACK ON BLACK CRIME AHEAD, you’ll know whom to thank for the roadside warnings.

I didn’t know enough about black culture. That 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 California 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 Eggers’s do-gooder condescension, I hadn’t spoken a single word. During roll call Foy never called me by my proper 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.

He and the rest of the non-Dickensian flock belonged to that scary subset of black lycanthropic thinkers I like to refer to as “wereniggers.” By day, wereniggers are erudite and urbane, but with every lunar cycle, fiscal quarter, and tenure review their hackles rise, and they slip into their floor-length fur coats and mink stoles, grow fangs, and schlep down from their ivory towers and corporate boardrooms to prowl the inner cities, so that they can howl at the full moon over drinks and mediocre blues music. Now that his fame, if not his fortune, has waned, werenigger Foy Cheshire’s foggy ghetto moor of choice is Dickens.

Like, why blame Mark Twain because you don’t have the patience and courage to explain to your children that the “n-word” exists and that during the course of their sheltered little lives they may one day be called a “nigger” or, even worse, deign to call somebody else a “nigger.” No one will ever refer to them as “little black euphemisms,” so welcome to the American lexicon—Nigger!

That’s the difference between most oppressed peoples of the world and American blacks. They vow never to forget, and we want everything expunged from our record, sealed and filed away for eternity. We want someone like Foy Cheshire to present our case to the world with a set of instructions that the jury will disregard centuries of ridicule and stereotype and pretend the woebegone niggers in front of you are starting from scratch.

“Problematic,” someone muttered, invoking the code word black thinkers use to characterize anything or anybody that makes them feel uncomfortable, impotent, and painfully aware that they don’t have the answers to questions and assholes like me.

Hurt that I expected everyone to care and no one did, I returned to my seat and spaced out after that. Half-listening to the usual diatribes about the dissolution of the black family and the need for black business. Waiting for Foy to say “and things of that nature,” which is the “Roger. Over and out” of black intellectual communication. “… and things of that nature.”

“When a white bitch got problems, she’s a damsel in distress! When a black bitch got problems, she’s a welfare cheat and a burden on society. How come you never see any black damsels? Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your weave!”

That’s true 🤔

Listing hard to the right like a drunken seaman with an inner ear infection.

What lol!

Your dad used to think I was bipolar, but what I really am is by myself.

I once heard Mike Tyson say, “Only in America can you be bankrupt and live in a mansion.”

Now that no one was looking, I waited for him to make the full werenigger transformation. Grow fangs and claws. I wondered if the hair on black werewolves was nappy. It had to be, right?

My father had a checklist to determine whether or not someone was losing his mind. He said there were telltale signs of a mental breakdown that people often mistake for force of personality. Aloofness. Mood swings. Delusions of grandeur.

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’d thought of it as “gardening,” I got a vicious beating that would’ve made Kunta Kinte wince.

Sometimes I’d chance across an elderly member of the community standing in the middle of the street, unable to cross the single white line. Puzzled looks on their faces from asking themselves why they felt so strongly about the Dickens side of the line as opposed to the other side. When there was just as much uncurbed dog shit over there as here. When the grass, what little of it there was, sure in the fuck wasn’t any greener. When the niggers were just as trifling, but for some reason they felt like they belonged on this side. And why was that? When it was just a line.

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.

Walking is akin to begging in the streets. Taxicabs are for foreigners and prostitutes. Bicycles, skateboards, and Rollerblades are for health nuts and kids, people with nowhere to go. And all cars, from the luxury import to the classified-ad jalopy, are status symbols, because no matter how shoddy the upholstery, how bouncy the ride, how fucked-up the paint job, the car, any car, is better than riding the bus.

it dawned on me that if places like Sedona, Arizona, have energy vortexes, mystical holy lands where visitors experience rejuvenation and spiritual awakenings, Los Angeles must have racism vortexes. Spots where visitors experience deep feelings of melancholy and ethnic worthlessness. Places like the breakdown lane on the Foothill Freeway, where Rodney King’s life, and in a sense America and its haughty notions of fair play, began their downward spirals.

“It’s not even an emotion. What does being offended say about how you feel? No great theater director ever said to an actor, ‘Okay, this scene calls for some real emotion, now go out there and give me lots of offendedness!’”

Eventually, the aging early-warning system inside Hominy’s nappy head screamed, “Look out! A white bitch!” and he snapped to “Yes, ma’am” attention. And without being asked or ordered, Hominy relinquished his seat in a manner so obsequious, so unctuously Negro, that the act was less an offer of his place than a bequeathal. Because to him that seat, as hard and plastic and orange-brown as it was, was her birthright, and his gesture was a tribute, a long-overdue payment to the gods of white superiority. If he could have figured out a way to stand up on bended knee, he would have.

The face worn every moment you’re on the job and not in the bathroom stall, the face flashed to the white person who saunters by and patronizingly pats you on the shoulder and says, “You’re doing a fine job. Keep up the good work.” The face that feigns acknowledgment that the better man got the promotion, even though deep down you and they both know that you really are the better man and that the best man is the woman on the second floor.

The way that these twin towns, as they’re sometimes known, choose and court each other seems more incestuous than adoptive. Some unions, like that of Tel Aviv and Berlin, Paris and Algiers, Honolulu and Hiroshima, are designed to signal an end to hostilities and the beginning of peace and prosperity; arranged marriages in which the cities learn to love one another over time. Others are shotgun weddings, because one city, (e.g., Atlanta) impregnated the other (e.g., Lagos) on a first date that spun violently out of control centuries ago. Some cities marry up for money and prestige; others marry down to piss off their mother countries. Guess who’s coming to dinner? Kabul! Every now and then, two cities meet and fall in love out of mutual respect and a love for hiking, thunderstorms, and classic rock ’n’ roll. Think Amsterdam and Istanbul. Buenos Aires and Seoul. But in the modern age, where your average town is too busy trying to balance budgets and keep the infrastructure from crumbling, most cities have a hard time finding a soul mate, so they turn to Sister City Global, an international matchmaking organization that finds love partners for lonely municipalities.

Next the thriving invisible city of Dickens formed sisterhoods with two more municipalities, Döllersheim, Austria, and the Lost City of White Male Privilege.

But in the end we found it impossible to ignore the impassioned pleas of the Lost City of White Male Privilege, a controversial municipality whose very existence is often denied by many (mostly privileged white males).

Those inclined to believe in free will and the free market argue that the Lost City of White Male Privilege was responsible for its own demise, that the constant stream of contradictory religious and secular edicts from on high confused the highly impressionable white male. Reduced him to a state of such severe social and psychic anxiety that he stopped fucking. Stopped voting. Stopped reading. And, most important, stopped thinking that he was the end-all, be-all, or at least knew enough to pretend not to be so in public. But in any case, it became impossible to walk the streets of the Lost City of White Male Privilege, feeding your ego by reciting mythological truisms like “We built this country!”

For black people “too many Mexicans” is the excuse we, the historically most documented workers in history, give ourselves for attending racist rallies protesting the undocumented workers seeking better living conditions. “Too many Mexicans” is an oral rationalization to remain stuck in our ways.

“Nobody cares about the subtle differences between manure and fertilizer or sustainable disease management in the butternut squash. These kids have short attention spans. You have to grab them immediately and never let go. I can’t imagine anything worse than last year, when your presentation was so fucking boring the kids threw your own organic tomatoes at you.”

“Marpessa’s going to be there.” I didn’t need any more smoke to know that I’d never stop loving that woman.

“All y’all retarted. Don’t you know cows human, too?” The irony of mispronouncing “retarded” notwithstanding, I knew that I was a hit, or at least the calf was.

“You don’t know?” “Know what?” “You talk a lot of shit about the hood, but you don’t know what’s going on in the hood. Ever since you put those signs up, Marpessa’s bus has been the safest place in the city. She’d forgotten all about them, too, until her shift supervisor pointed out she hadn’t had an incident report since Hominy’s birthday party. But then she started thinking about it. How people were treating each other with respect. Saying hello when they got on, thank you when they got off. There’s no gang fighting. Crip, Blood, or cholo, they press the Stop Request button one time and one fucking time only. You know where the kids go do their homework? Not home, not the library, but the bus. That’s how safe it is.” “Crime is cyclical.” “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.”

“Those aren’t books. Those came from Foy Cheshire. He has a whole curriculum called ‘Fire the Canon!’ featuring such rewritten classics as Uncle Tom’s Condo and The Point Guard in the Rye that he’s pushing on the school board. Look, we’ve tried everything: smaller classrooms, longer hours, bilingual, monolingual, and sublingual educations, Ebonics, phonics, and hypnotics. Color schemes designed to promote the optimum learning environment.

Real talk. When I was young, dumb, and full of cum, my omnipresent, good to my mother, non-stereotypical African-American daddy dropped some knowledge on me that I been trippin’ off of ever since.

“By race? You want to segregate the school by color?” Charisma looked at me like I was one of her students. Not stupid, but clueless. But if you asked me, Chaff Middle School had already been segregated and re-segregated many times over, maybe not by color, but certainly by reading level and behavior problem. The English as a Second Language speakers were on a different learning track than the English When and Only If I Feel Like It speakers. During Black History Month, my father used to watch the nightly television footage of the Freedom buses burning, the dogs snarling and snapping, and say to me, “You can’t force integration, boy. The people who want to integrate will integrate.” I’ve never figured out to what extent, if at all, I agree or disagree with him, but it’s an observation that’s stayed with me. Made me realize that for many people integration is a finite concept. 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? No one’s ever defined the concept. Charisma was giving segregation some thought, though, as she slowly rotated the last of the marshmallows in the flame. I knew what she was thinking. She was thinking about how her middle-school alma mater was now 75 percent Latino, when in her day it was 80 percent black. Thinki...

I’ve experienced direct discrimination based on race only once in my life. One day I foolishly said to my father that there was no racism in America. Only equal opportunity that black people kick aside because we don’t want to take responsibility for ourselves. Later that very same day, in the middle of the night, he snatched me up out of bed, and together we took an ill-prepared cross-country trip into deepest, whitest America. After three days of nonstop driving, we ended up in a nameless Mississippi town that was nothing more than a dusty intersection of searing heat, crows, cotton fields, and, judging by the excited look of anticipation on my father’s face, unadulterated racism.

I hung my head in embarrassment. 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”?

Thanks to years of my father’s black vernacular pop quizzes and an Ishmael Reed book he kept on top of the toilet for years, I knew that “reckless eyeballing” was the act of a black male deigning to look at a southern white female.

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

“I’m bisexual. I likes both.” “Ain’t no such thing. You either is or you ain’t.