The White Boy Shuffle

As is natural for any middle-class white man growing up in rural England, I have long been a fan of hip-hop, basketball, Spike Lee films and many other aspects of black American culture. Perhaps it's precisely because it's all so far removed from my own experience that I find it all so engaging and intriguing, perhaps it's the varying depths to it, or maybe it's because it all just sounds so fun. In any case, I'm fairly sure I would be considered one of the Caucasians on the outside looking in that Paul Beatty takes aim at in 1996's The White Boy Shuffle.

Primarily a poet, Beatty's debut novel is a paradoxically rambling yet tight coming-of-age tale tracking the exploits of one Gunnar Kaufmann, an obscenely gifted young black man growing up in 1980s Los Angeles. Gunnar introduces himself by way of his ancestry, a procession of shameless servants to the white man, from the man who accidentally kicked off the War of Independence to the ballet-composing great-great-great grandfather who voluntarily subjected himself to slavery, to Gunnar's own estranged father now working as a sketch artist for the LAPD. Gunnar himself grows up in an affluent neighbourhood in Southern California, up until the point his mother decides his experience thus far hasn't been "black" enough and promptly relocates the family to an entirely non-white area of the city, named The Hillside here but likely based on Compton. At first, Gunnar struggles to fit in in pretty much any way, but gradually learns to make the most of what he has. It's here that the book really kicks off, introducing a host of colourful characters and plot lines. Gunnar discovers a God-given talent for basketball despite never having played before, joins the city's most hopeless gang (The Gun Totin' Hooligans, hopeless because, despite their name, they refuse to carry guns) and by way of friend Nicholas is introduced to jazz and intellectualism. For all the success basketball brings him, he discovers his true talent is poetry, and begins spray painting his work on the neighbourhood walls.

This all makes for an entertaining and at times laugh-out-loud read - made all the more enjoyable by Beatty's exceptionally good prose style. His background in poetry is clear to see, the words veritably tumbling off the page in a flurry of alliteration, assonance and wordplay, and the poems he creates for Gunnar are worthy of a collection in their own right.

But as fun as all this sounds, The White Boy Shuffle is not without its heavier moments, especially as it moves into the final third. Accepting a scholarship to Boston University, Gunnar becomes increasingly disillusioned with the classmates and academics who worship his every move just because of his colour, the black student groups who defeat their own object with their rabid exceptionalism, and the feeling that none of it matters anyway. His trips around the country to play basketball with Nicholas become less fun as the white crowds continue to turn on him, he can't attend class for fear of being mobbed, and despite his best efforts to shun the attention of the black student groups, he ends up becoming a cult leader to them anyway. Once Nicholas commits suicide, Gunnar heads with his Japanese mail-order wife back to LA to establish a commune for minorities, ultimately turning his back on the world and daring the government to drop a nuclear bomb on the city to solve the issue once and for all.

Beatty tackles some truly weighty themes: hypocrisy on all sides, the inherent racism and classism that pervades American society and the fundamental ineffectiveness of idealism, and satirises them all with little mercy. The White Boy Shuffle is a million miles removed from any life I'll ever know, but it certainly made me understand a bit better why being black in America is quite so hard. Beatty's concluding verse sums it up in all its painful simplicity:

Like the Reverend King
I too "have a dream"
but when I wake up
I forget it and
remember I'm running late for work.

4.5/5

Twenty years on and Kendrick Lamar is still having to say all the same things.