The Sellout

by Paul Beatty

Black America: Veni, vidi, vici—Fried Chicken! peeled

Black America Motto

Sinological shout-outs to dead loved ones that they think means “Rest in peace, Grandma Beverly,” but in reality reads “No tickee! No Bilateral Trade Agreement!” Man, it’d be a goldmine.

Sinological motto...hilarious!

For these are a people for whom the phrase “Well, if you put a gun to my head…” isn’t theoretical, and when someone has pressed a cold metal muzzle to the yin and yang symbol tattooed on your temple and you’ve lived to tell about it, you don’t need to have read the I Ching to appreciate the cosmic balance of the universe and the power of the tramp stamp. Because what else could your motto possibly be but “What goes around, comes around … Quod circumvehitur, revehitur.”

Powerful description of how different life can be for people surrounded by depravity and crime. Whole different perspective.

Money talks, bullshit walks … Pecunia sermo, somnium ambulo.

Black women have beautiful hands, and with every “fuck you” cocoa-butter stab of the air, her hands become more and more elegant. They’re the hands of a poet, one of those natural-haired, brass-bangled teacher-poets whose elegiac verse compares everything to jazz. Childbirth is like jazz. Muhammad Ali is like jazz. Philadelphia is like jazz. Jazz is like jazz. Everything is like jazz except for me. To her I’m like a remixed Anglo-Saxon appropriation of black music.

Imagery is beautiful, its hard to understand whether the author is being sarcastic or sincere in his appreciation of beauty of Black women's hands. Too good.

That omnipresent guilt that’s as black as fast-food apple pie and prison basketball is finally gone, and it feels almost white to be unburdened from the racial shame that makes a bespectacled college freshman dread Fried Chicken Fridays at the dining hall.

I understand now that the only time black people don’t feel guilty is when we’ve actually done something wrong, because that relieves us of the cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent, and in a way the prospect of going to jail becomes a relief. In the way that cooning is a relief, voting Republican is a relief, marrying white is a relief—albeit a temporary one.

At this point, after five years of endless decisions, reversals, appeals, postponements, and pretrial hearings, I don’t even know if I’m the plaintiff or the defendant. All I know is that the sour-faced Justice with the post-racial chronometer won’t stop looking at me. His beady eyes fixed in this unblinking and unforgiving stare, he’s angry that I’ve fucked up his political expediency. Blown up his spot like a little kid visiting the city zoo for the first time and, frustrated at having walked past cage after seemingly empty reptile cage, finally stops at an enclosure and shouts, “There he is!

When I was seven months, Pops placed objects like toy police cars, cold cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, Richard Nixon campaign buttons, and a copy of The Economist in my bassinet, but instead of conditioning me with a deafening clang, I learned to be afraid of the presented stimuli because they were accompanied by him taking out the family .38 Special and firing several window-rattling rounds into the ceiling, while shouting, “Nigger, go back to Africa!” loud enough to make himself heard over the quadraphonic console stereo blasting “Sweet Home Alabama” in the living room. To this day I’ve never been able to sit through even the most mundane TV crime drama, I have a strange affinity for Neil Young, and whenever I have trouble sleeping, I don’t listen to recorded rainstorms or crashing waves but to the Watergate tapes.

It’s not music that soothes the savage beast but the systematic desensitization.

One Halloween he yanked the doorbell wires from his living room wall and attached them to his testes, so when the trick-or-treaters rang the buzzer, instead of candy and an autographed photo, they got blood-curdling screams that continued until I fought my way through the sadistic throng of fairy godmothers and superheroes and pulled She-Hulk’s green eight-year-old finger away from the ringer long enough for me to talk Hominy into pulling his pants up and the shades down.

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.

I’ve always liked rote. The formulaic repetitiveness of filing and stuffing envelopes appeals to me in some fundamental life-affirming way. I would’ve made a good factory worker, supply-room clerk, or Hollywood scriptwriter.

It became just me knocking on his door and asking Hominy what he wanted for his birthday this year. His answer was always the same: “I don’t know. Just get me some racism and I’ll be straight.”

ALL EMPLOYEES MUST WASH THEIR HANDS AND THEIR MINDS BEFORE RETURNING TO THEIR LIVES.

“Don’t worry, these things are like all-terrain vehicles and damn near amphibious. Between the mudslides and L.A.’s shitty sewage system, a bus has to be able to slog through anything. If we’d used Metro buses to land on the beaches of Normandy on D-day, World War II would’ve ended two years earlier.”

Mexicans are to blame for everything. Someone in California sneezes, you don’t say “Gesundheit” but “Too many Mexicans.” Your horse in the fifth comes up lame in the backstretch at Santa Anita? Too many Mexicans. The donkey on the button rivers a third queen at Commerce Casino? Too many Mexicans.

everyone in Dickens, regardless of race, was black and you determined someone’s degree of blackness not by skin color or hair texture but by whether they said “For all intents and purposes” or “For all intensive purposes.” Marpessa used to say that despite the fall of straight black hair that cascaded down to her butt and her horchata complexion, she didn’t know Charisma wasn’t black until the day Charisma’s mother stopped by to pick her up from school. Her walk and talk so different from her daughter’s. Stunned, she turned to her best friend. “You Mexican?” Thinking her homegirl was tripping, Charisma blanched, about to exclaim, “I ain’t Mexican,” when, as if seeing her for the first time, she took a good look at her own mother in the after-school context of the surrounding black faces and rhythms, and was like “Oh fuck, I am Mexican! ¡Hijo de puta!” That was a long time ago.

Incredible demonstration by author on how self-realization strikes us in the most unsual ways.

I decided to give my new career as City Planner in Charge of Restoration and Segregation another six months. If things didn’t work out, I could always fall back on being black.

Insane sense of humour.

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

“A little black boy is in the kitchen watching his mother fry up some chicken. Seeing the flour, he dabs some on his face. ‘Look at me, Ma,’ he says, ‘I’m white!’ ‘What’d you say?’ says his mama, and the boy says, ‘Look at me, I’m white!’ WHAP! His mama slaps the shit out of him. ‘Don’t you ever say that!’ she says, then tells him to go tell his father what he said to her. Crying hard as Niagara Falls, the boy goes up to his father. ‘What’s wrong, son?’ ‘M-M-Mommy sl-sl-slapped me!’ ‘Why she do that, son?’ his father asks. ‘B-b-because I-I said I was w-w-white.’ ‘What?’ BLAAAAM! His father slaps him even harder than his mama did. ‘Now go tell your grandmother what you said! She’ll teach you!’ So the boy’s crying and shaking and all confused. He approaches his grandmother. ‘Why, baby, what’s wrong?’ she asks. And the boy says, ‘Th-th-they sl-slapped me.’ ‘Why, baby—why they’d do that?’ He tells her his story and when he gets to the end, PIE-YOW! His grandmamma slaps him so hard she almost knocks him down. ‘Don’t you ever say that,’ she says. ‘Now what did you learn?’ The boy starts rubbing his cheek and says, ‘I learned that I’ve been white for only ten minutes and I hate you niggers already!’”

I’m frigid. Not in the sense that I don’t have any sexual desire, but in the obnoxious way men in the free-love seventies projected their own sexual inadequacies onto women by referring to them as “frigid” and “dead fish.” I’m the deadest of fish. I fuck like an overturned guppy. A plate of day-old sashimi has more “motion of the ocean” than I do. So on the day of the shooting and drive-by orange-ing, when Marpessa stuck a tongue suspiciously tangy with satsuma tartness into my mouth and ground her pudenda into my pelvic bone, I lay there on my bed—motionless. My hands covering my face in shame, because fucking me is like fucking Tutankhamen’s sarcophagus. 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.