The Sellout

by Paul Beatty

Be it ancient Rome or modern-day America, you’re either citizen or slave. Lion or Jew. Guilty or innocent. Comfortable or uncomfortable.

The meetings consisted mostly of the members who showed up every other week arguing with the ones who came every other month about what exactly “bimonthly” means.

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! But I’d forgotten to order any milk to wash the cookies down with.

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 closed one eye and held a half-bitten cookie so that the dark brown semicircle sat atop Foy’s gigantic head like a well-coiffed Nabisco Afro that read OREO at its center.

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 the line wouldn’t be a line at all but drops of blood, or an uninterrupted string of graffiti signing off on my efforts, ____AceBoonakatheWest sideCrazy63rdStGangsta____, or, as in the case of the corner fronting the L.A. LGBTDL Crisis Center for Chicanos, Blacks, Non-Gays, and Anyone Else Who Feels Underserved, Unsupported, and Exploited by Hit Cable Television Shows, an arcing three-foot-wide, four-hundred-foot-long rainbow anchored with pots of gold condoms.

leaflet promoting a mysterious dream job that paid $1,000 a week, working from home. I hoped whoever posted that flyer had had a talk with human resources, because I seriously doubted they were making even $300 a week, and they definitely weren’t working from home.

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.

Laguna Beach volleyball white. Bel Air white. Omakaze white. Spicolli white. Brett Easton Ellis white. Three first names white. Valet parking white. Brag about your Native American, Argentinian, Portuguese ancestry white. Pho white. Paparazzi white. I once got fired from a telemarketing job, now look at me, I’m famous white. Calabazas white. I love L.A. It’s the only place where you can go skiing, to the beach and to the desert all in one day white.

Sometimes we’d set the text to music and break-dance to the The Metamorphosis,

that invariably slide down the bridges of African-American and Asian noses. But when I’d noticed that Hominy and Rodney Glen King shared the same birthday, April 2, 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.

“What does that mean, I’m offended?”

“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!’”

I was surprised how many of the children carried lighters, but no matter how many attempts were made to start the bonfire, the water-soaked wood wouldn’t catch. Charisma ordered a group of students to the storage shed. They returned bearing cardboard boxes, the contents of which they dumped on the ground. Soon there was a pyramid of books about five feet wide and three feet high and rising. “Well, what the fuck are you waiting for?” She didn’t have to ask twice. The books caught like kindling, and the flames of a good-sized bonfire licked the sky as the students happily roasted marshmallows on number two pencils. I pulled Charisma aside. I couldn’t believe she was burning books. “I thought school supplies were in short supply.” “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.

“You know what’s not gay … being gay.”

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.

Underneath the faded WHITES ONLY stenciled on the grimy lavatory door, I ran my finger through the grit and wrote THANK GOD, then peed on

an anthill. Because apparently the rest of the planet was “Colored Only.”

I just call the place the Plethora for short, because despite Marpessa’s insistence that I had no sense of humor, there were a plethora of unfunny black guys who, like every black sports analyst trying to sound intelligent, use and misuse the word “plethora” at every opportunity. As in: Q: How many white boys does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: A plethora! Because they stole it from a black man! Lewis Latimer, a black man who invented the lightbulb and a plethora of other smart-ass shit! And believe me, jokes like that would get a plethora of applause.

Those motherfuckers segregate because they want to hold on to power. I’m a farmer: we segregate in an effort to give every tree, every plant, every poor Mexican, every poor nigger, a chance for equal access to sunlight and water; we make sure every living organism has room to breathe.

We placed them in such a way that if folks on one side of the street wanted to know what the sign on their side said, they’d have to cross the tracks to read it. So they had to venture into enemy territory, only to discover that the sign on the north side of the street was exactly the same as the one on the south; they both read THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE TRACKS.

I stared at the black-faced woman in blackface, wondering if she, too, was acting, if she felt free. If she was aware that the natural color of her skin was actually blacker than her “blackface.” Meaning technically she was in somewhat-lighter-than-blackface. Hominy

You have to ask yourself two questions: Who am I? and How may I become myself?

A long time ago, my father taught me that whenever you see a question on the cover of a news magazine, the answer is always “No,” because the editorial staff knows that questions with “Yes” answers would, like graphic cigarette warnings and close-ups of pus-oozing genitalia that tend not to deter but encourage smoking and unsafe sex, scare the reader off.

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

de Triomphes, and Eiffel Towers built during World War I to fool the German bombers. Like the Germans, who, in turn, in the next war, built fake stores, theaters, and parks in Theresienstadt to dupe the Red Cross into believing that no atrocities were taking place, when the entire war was a series of fucking atrocities—one bullet, one illegal detention, one sterilization, one atom bomb at a time. You

“It’s illegal to yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater, right?” “It is.” “Well, I’ve whispered ‘Racism’ in a post-racial world.”

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 reenter the chambers to find an insanely pale white boy in my seat. It’s like he’s waited until the fourth quarter of the ball game to move down from the upper deck, sneak past the ushers to take a courtside chair vacated by some fan who’s left early to beat the traffic. I’m reminded of the black stand-up trope about white patrons returning to find “niggers in they seats” and drawing straws to decide who’s going to ask them to move. “You in my seat, dude.” “Hey, I just wanted to tell you that I feel like my constitutionality is on trial, too. And you don’t seem to have many people in your cheering section.” He waved his invisible pompoms in the air. Ricka-rocka! Ricka-rocka! Sis! Boom! Bah!

The prevalence of child abuse in this country is hard to talk about, too, but you never hear people complaining about it. They just don’t talk about it. And when’s the last time you had a calm, measured conversation about the joys of consensual incest? Sometimes things are simply difficult to discuss, but I actually think the country does a decent job of addressing race, and when folks say, “Why can’t we talk about race more honestly?” What they really mean is “Why can’t you niggers be reasonable?” or “Fuck you, white boy. If I said what I really wanted to say, I’d get fired even faster than you’d fire me if race were any easier to talk about.” And by race we mean “niggers,” because no one of any persuasion seems to have any difficulty talking out-of-pocket shit about Native Americans, Latinos, Asians, and America’s newest race,

the Celebrity.

“I think we’ve established the legal quandary here as to whether a violation of civil rights law that results in the very same achievement these heretofore mentioned statutes were meant to promote, yet have failed to achieve, is in fact a breach of said civil rights. What we must not fail to remember is that ‘separate but equal’ was struck down, not on any moral grounds, but on the basis that the Court found that separate can never be equal. 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.’

Silence can be either protest or consent, but most times it’s fear.

That’s what I liked about the man, although I didn’t agree with him when he said, “Get out. This is our thing.” I respected that he didn’t give a fuck. But I wish I hadn’t been so scared, that I had had the nerve to stand in protest. Not to castigate him for what he did or to stick up for the aggrieved white people. After all, they could’ve stood up for themselves, called in the authorities or their God, and smote everybody in the place, but I wish I’d stood up to the man and asked him a question: “So what exactly is our thing?”