The White Boy Shuffle
| Author | Paul Beatty |
|---|---|
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher | Houghton Mifflin, Picador |
|
Publication date
|
1996 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 226 |
| ISBN | |
| 813'.54 dc21 | |
| LC Class | PS3552.E19W45 1997 |
The White Boy Shuffle is the 1996 first novel of poet Paul Beatty. A coming-of-age tale about a young African American man's search for identity, the novel was met with critical acclaim, but failed to gain a large audience. It has been noted for its postmodern treatment of African American gender and sexuality in addition to race.
In the book's prologue, the reader meets the narrator, Gunnar Kaufman, a prolific African-American poet whose astronomically successful book, Watermelanin, has sold 126 million copies, elevating him to the status of "Negro Demagogue." The prologue asserts that what follows are Gunnar memoirs, "the battlefield remains of a frightened deserter in the eternal war for civility" (2). The novel opens with a comic survey of Gunnar's family tree, as his mother relates the tales of his family history to him and his sisters. Gunnar in turn regales his classmates with the tales of his ancestors, one of whom Gunnar claims dodged the bullet that eventually killed Crispus Attucks in the Boston Massacre. Gunnar is a young boy growing up in affluent, predominantly white Santa Monica, California with his mother and sisters. His absent father is a sketch artist for the LAPD and rarely sees his children. Gunnar's friends are white, and he spends his free time making enough mischief to gain him mild admonishments from the Santa Monica Shore Patrol.
When Gunnar and his sisters tell their mother they do not want to attend an all-black summer camp because the children there "are different from us," Ms. Kaufman immediately packs up a U-Haul and relocates her family to the West Los Angeles neighborhood of Hillside, a predominantly black community surrounded by a concrete wall that Gunnar describes as the ghetto (37). In Hillside, the Kaufman children encounter an altogether different lifestyle than the one they were accustomed to in Santa Monica. Gunnar learns "the hard way that social norms in Santa Monica were unforgivable breaches of proper Hillside etiquette, and soon after arriving is beaten up by one of the area's local gangs, the "Gun Totin' Hooligans" (52).
Enrolling in the local junior high, Gunnar is offered protection by an administrator who fears that Gunnar's unfamiliarity with Hillside social norms will make him an easy target for harassment. However, Gunnar soon strikes up a friendship with Nicholas Scoby when he is paired with the "thuggish boy" in a reading of William Shakespeare's Othello (66). Scoby is a prodigious basketball player, with a remarkable ability to make, without exception, every basket. Soon after meeting Scoby, Gunnar stuns the local children when he unintentionally exhibits his own, heretofore unknown talent for basketball, dunking the ball into the basket in a pickup game. His talent gains him respect within the Hillside community of youths. Ironically, this unusual talent causes him to stick out enables him to fit into the social scene. Around this time, Gunnar writes his first poem, "Negro Misappropriation of Greek Mythology or, I know Niggers That'll Kick Hercules's Ass" and spray paints the lines across the concrete wall surrounding Hillside. Later, instructed by Scoby, Gunnar changes his hairstyle and attire in an effort to further conform to Hillside society.
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