My prom date, second cousin, my president is black (or whatever).: The problem is that we don’t know whether integration is natural or an unnatural state. Here, in America, “integration” can be a cover-up.

It sets up false expectations and is a trick-bag. I think what the character and Beatty are saying is that the pretense of integration and equality muddies the water. Because she knew that even in these times of racial equality, when someone whiter than us, richer than us, blacker than us, Chineser than us, better than us, whatever than us, comes around throwing their equality in our faces, it brings out our need to impress, to behave, to tuck in our shirts, do our homework, show up on time, make our free throws, teach, and prove our self-worth in hopes that we won’t be fired, arrested, or trucked away and shot. She understood the colored person’s desire for the domineering white presence, which the Wheaton Academy represented.

It’s causing good things to happen, and he starts to get an idea of why:Ĭharisma had intuitively grasped the psychological subtleties of my plan even as it was just starting to make sense to me. The Sellout, Paul Beatty’s 2015 novel and winner of the Man Booker Prize, is a wildly free-wheeling satire of race relations in the United States that seems designed to offend just about everyone, several times over.Īt its witty, angry, bitter heart, though, it has a message.Ībout two-thirds of the way through the novel, the central character - whose last name is Me and whose first name is never given - ruminates on the surprising byproducts of his seemingly nihilistic campaign to resegregate his small city of Dickens and its black population.

The sellout book