Unmitigated Blackness: Paul Beatty’s Post-Soul Critique of Double Consciousness
In the work of writer James Baldwin, we find two competing strains of political thought. On the one hand, there lies a perpetual social critique of America and its concomitant sociopolitical issues. And, on the other, there exists a desire for integration into the social fabric of the very nation that oppresses him. Baldwin’s complicated relationship with the America of his day is emblematized in the autobiographical notes to Notes of a Native Son: “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” Readers of African American literature find this double impulse not only in the work of civil rights era writers the likes of Baldwin, but also in the works of post-soul writers, such as humorist Paul Beatty. Beatty’s work as a satirist nuances Baldwin’s political awareness, while his characters often embody DuBoisian double consciousness. Instead of brooding on the plight of blacks in America, he injects a sense of humor into his work to question what it means to be black in America. Instead of eschewing racial stereotypes, he deploys them to effectively problematize black essentialism.
While Beatty’s work pokes fun and offends, a critical question looms: How does the political satirist’s irreverence for America’s sacred institutions (the political economy, the economies of race) impact an analysis of oppression? Thus, employing the theories of DuBois and Baldwin, this conference paper explores the ways Beatty complicates the fractured and competing identities of the black subject to trouble the waters of racial identity itself in his latest novel, The Sellout.
In the tradition of neoslave narratives that imagine a return to antebellum America to reconcile the afterlives of slavery in the contemporary moment, Paul Beatty’s latest novel The Sellout does so too even if not as generically positioned. His satires stretch wider their scope to encompass a fluctuating multicultural America of the “post-soul” era. In “Theorizing the Post-Soul Aesthetic,” Bertram D. Ashe outlines criteria in the post-civil rights black cultural “movement,”[1] noting that post-soul participants tackle: “the peculiar pains, pleasures, and problems of race in the post-civil rights movement United States; the use of nontraditionally black cultural influences in their work; and the resultant exploration of the boundaries of blackness” (611).
Steven Weisenburger categorizes a degenerative satire — observing a “delegitimizing” tendency “to subvert hierarchies of value and to reflect suspiciously on all ways of making meaning, including its own…” (26). Satirically treating issues that plague America’s legacy — histories of slavery, police violence, gangs, racial discrimination and segregation — Beatty signifies on race-based stereotypes, racist lexicons, everyday racism, and violent racist acts often deliberately undermining the meaning making capacity of his own work. It is worth noting that he identifies his work in the absurdist tradition, wholly appropriate for the world he creates as a response to the experience of anti-blackness of the world we live in. The Sellout centralizes the perspective of black characters demonstrative of the fact that whiteness is incidental to its plot as racism resembles contemporary US antagonisms — earmarked by absurd anti-blackness that serves no concrete utility.
One interesting plot line follows the trajectory of the partially nameless narrator-protagonist called Me’s experiential crisis after his father, FK Me, is killed by police. Rendering the contemporary phenomenon of extrajudicial killing that is neither uniquely contemporary nor spectacular, exceptional only because FK Me is a well-known social scientist, accentuates Beatty’s critique of the crisis of the negro intellectual. Beyond merely brooding[2]
on the plight of blacks in America, Beatty appeals to humor to further question what it means to be a black intellectual in neoliberal, ostensible post-racial America. Instead of eschewing racial stereotypes, he deploys them along with other (self-)racisms effectively problematizing racial essentialism.
Our introduction to the novel’s diegesis begins with a prologue playing on black stereotypes that comprise the American racial imaginary. As a part-time horticulturalist, sometimes marijuana dealer, and follows in his father’s footsteps as the neighborhood “nigger whisper” Me introspectively opens the novel with the following interior monologue:
This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I’ve never stolen anything. Never cheated on my taxes or at cards…I’ve never burgled a house. Held up a liquor store. Never boarded a crowded bus or subway car, sat in a seat reserved for the elderly, pulled out my gigantic penis and masturbated to satisfaction with a perverted, yet somehow crestfallen, look on my face. But here I am, in the cavernous chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, my car illegally and somewhat ironically parked on Constitution Avenue, my hands cuffed and crossed behind my back, my right to remain silent long since waived and said goodbye to as I sit in a thickly padded chair that, much like this country, isn’t quite as comfortable as it looks. (3)
While Me postulates his innocence in the court of American political commonsense and enumerates the crimes he did not commit in the context of a litany of incendiary racial tropes that often play out in the mediascape, as they do in the world of the novel, Beatty draws our attention to the “cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent” (18) — echoing the mythology that conflates blackness and criminality, a point to which I will return later. More significant is the drama at the heart of the post-racial fantasy that plays out as Me is prosecuted for the racially violent crimes of a nation that has never redressed its oppressed — this in the backdrop of the justified killing of his father.
Unlike the cops who gun down FK Me, Me is prosecuted for crimes committed in good conscious as a slaver and a neo-segregationist. He reluctantly enslaves Hominy Jenkins, the oldest surviving member of the Little Rascals, who convinces Me that he is born to be a slave, constantly referring to Me as Massa: telling us “sometimes we just have to accept who we are and act accordingly. I’m a slave. That’s who I am. It’s the role I was born to play” (77). Me turns himself in only after negotiating with the police about a suitable charge that will stick. Beatty operates with a sense of dramatic irony, here “a black irony, an outgrowth of postmodernism” to borrow from Toure, that plays and preys on the racial sensitivities of overdetermined scripts.
Whereas Henry Louis Gates in his seminal work of poststructuralism The Signifyin’ Monkey
argues that parody — not only of America’s sacred institutions but also self-parody of blackness — is inherent in black cultural production, I explore his argument apropos post-soul literature, to inquire: does Beatty’s post-soul parody impact an analysis of oppression in the same way?
Operating in the context of the post-soul production and employing a reading of DuBoisian double consciousness, this paper explores the ways Beatty complicates the fractured and competing narratives of black subjectivity to trouble racial identity. Building on assertions advanced by scholars Stuart Hall, Kali Tal, Lisa Guerrero, among others, that suggests that “African Americans are inherently postmodern subjects whose condition has consistently been one of dislocation — from society, from self, from humanity, and in the supposedly post-racial twenty-first century, even from race the postmodern nature of the black subject” (267), I submit that this reading of Beatty’s postmodernism makes available DuBoisian double consciousness as anticipating black postmodernism — both outside of the project of modernity and antagonistic to the project of modernity.
My essay focuses on the interstices of what Jared Sexton calls “unbearable blackness[3]” and what Beatty calls “unmitigated blackness.[4]” While Me’s self-reflexivity is in some ways heightened by double consciousness, he pushes against and moves outside it to critique the conceptualization’s usefulness at our sociocultural stage in the American racial imaginary marred by perpetually identitarian contradictions for its black citizens — burdened uniquely by both Americanness and blackness in post-soul America.
W. E. B. DuBois’ seminal work of political thought The Souls of Black Folk captures “the strange meaning of being black” in America at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1903, he articulates a particular tension apropos identity formation for black Americans struck by a crisis of consciousness, or what he famously terms “double consciousness.” DuBois elaborates on the condition: “this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his “twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body... (15).
Interesting here is that DuBois considers this sensation a gift, proposing earlier in the passage that blacks are “gifted with second-sight in this American world” (14). For DuBois, this tension somehow enhances one’s self-awareness even at the expense of “no true self-consciousness, [and] only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world,” affording him the capacity “to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self” (16).
It should be noted that although DuBois never explicitly returns to the notion of double consciousness in his career, he would later formulate and espouse this caveat of double consciousness and the potential therein for black men in his problematically gendered and intensely classist “Talented Tenth” ethos — elaborated as a better/truer self — problematic owing to what is diluted and amenable in blackness capable of producing the desired effect of/in civilizing — integration into civil society. While DuBois perceives the condition as a gift, it curses other black intellectuals — stressed by the inability to effectively if ever truly articulate oneself in the American context. To be sure, we find a similar struggle in the work of civil rights era writers the likes of James Baldwin.
In Baldwin, on the one hand, there lies a perpetual sociopolitical critique of America and its concomitant failings. On the other, there exists a gesturing toward integration into the social fabric of the very nation that oppresses him. Baldwin’s complicated relationship with America is politically emblematized in the autobiographical Notes of a Native Son: “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually” intensifying his critiques from abroad after he expatriated to France and Turkey.
Baldwin eventually points to something like double consciousness as the catalyst that drives him to leave the country, telling the Paris Review in 1984: “I knew what it meant to be white and I knew what it meant to be a nigger, and I knew what was going to happen to me. My luck was running out. I was going to go to jail, I was going to kill somebody or be killed.” Thus, the problematic of inarticulacy transcends the soul, as DuBois imagines it, to affect the possibility of a livable life by the time Baldwin encounters the sensation. In a conversation with Audre Lorde, Baldwin asserts: “One of the dangers of being a Black American is being schizophrenic. To be a Black American is in some ways to be born with the desire to be white. It’s a part of the price you pay for being born here, and it affects every Black person.”
The Sellout’s narrative nor the characters are constrained in the same ways DuBois and Baldwin’s schizophrenic conditions, solely between blackness and Americanness. Rather, double consciousness is articulated in similar ways along a different axis. As alluded to earlier, Me is confined to/by his blackness in the context of criminality. He tells us: “That’s the bitch of it, to be on trial for my life, and for the first time ever not feel guilty. 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” (17).
Here — and now, somewhere in post-soul, post-racial America — disavowing as much as possible a linear progress narrative — there is not so much a tension between one’s ability to articulate himself as being caught between vectors of Americanness and blackness, oscillating between innocence and guilt in the context of racial shame, rather, in the world of the novel, the impetus is on Beatty and his world making possibilities in creating his own definitions of blackness. Beatty turns his attention not to the question of how identity is defined and expressed, but to the preoccupation of how race is being constructed.
Rejecting the bounds of temporality, he reaches “back” in time to slavery and segregation to trouble identity, to perpetually reappraise and reconfigure blackness, undertaking what Bertram D. Ashe has termed “blaxploration”: “the proclivity to trouble blackness.” Drawing on the “hybrid, fluid, elastic, cultural mulattoesque sense of black identity” (Ashe 612), Beatty operates in opposition to assumed racial stereotypes and identity markers to initiate an experiential racial identity.
To occupy such an antagonistic posturing to racial/cultural blackness, Beatty’s cultural work “troubles blackness, worries blackness; stirs it up, touches it, feels it out, and holds it up for examination in ways that depart significantly from previous — and necessary — preoccupations with struggling for political freedom, or with an attempt to establish and sustain a coherent black identity” (614). Beatty’s work argues that he is not merely defined by his blackness per se but redefines common definitions of blackness. Deidre L. Wheaton claims that Beatty differentiates the popular culture brand of blackness—grounded in Richard Majors’ notion of the “cool pose,” or resistance by way of style — “in Beatty’s imagination represents equally narrow traditional black literary tropes of authenticity, and his own brand of blackness — which recognizes the on-going challenges of blackness yet refuses to take them too seriously” (101).
Beatty accomplishes this waylaying of blackness by drawing on “nontraditionally” black cultural influences in his work. Me, for example, is as much invested in surfing as he is in Eurocentric intellectualism: Franz Kafka, Leo Tolstoy and well-versed in the work of Jean-Luc Godard. While a certain post-soul freedom of definition exists for Me, he can only push against his personally defined blackness insofar as he is tied to it — in his — and the world’s assumptions of blackness. He alludes to the fact that he “doesn’t know much about black culture,” which earns him the nickname “the sellout.” Me’s resistance to blackness, evidenced repeatedly by his “fuck being black” proclamations — selling weed is about the only black thing Me does — culminates in a sense of fractured identity — where he admits: “I had no idea who I was, and no clue how to become myself.”
We are left wondering at various points in the novel, for Me, what true self exists? Pushing against the political common sense leaves him in a precarious position in the black community, on trial for his life, perpetually confused about everything: “After five years...I don't even know if I'm the plaintiff or the defendant…I stood before the court, trying to figure out if there was a state of being between "guilty" and "innocent." Why were those my only alternatives? I thought. Why couldn't I be "neither" or "both"?
Not only does Beatty challenge racial politics as a marker of his anti-essentialist dictates via racial slavery, but he challenges liberal political gains of the Civil Rights era. He critiques its symbolism joking: “Is it my fault that the only tangible benefit to come out of the civil rights movement is that black people aren't as afraid of dogs as they used to be?” (19). In response to Me’s disappearing hometown Dickens — a fictionalized Compton mysteriously wiped off the map — made the more interesting considering the plight of DuBois and Baldwin’s expatriation is Me’s desire for integration domestically — where we see appeals to keep Dickens incorporated.
Nostalgia for a return to how things were materializes as Me avers that the specter of segregation may be what brings the city and the definition of its residents back to life. He starts by resegregating the public busses before segregating the high schools, two moves that simultaneously improve the local transit system, the public education system, and the self-esteem of Dickens residents.
The article “Taking the Offensive: The Quest for New Politics in Contemporary Black Satire” seeks a “new politics” singularly accessible in the post-soul moment owing precisely to what Dixon-Carr notes as the “transformation of the status of African Americans within the American political landscape, a status that can no longer be viewed in the same light of the pre-civil rights era” (2). Interestingly, the novel historically coincides with Obama’s last years in office to balance a promising political victory in an ironic tenor that juxtaposes the nation’s first black president alongside the nation’s most high-profile black slaveholder. Beatty contrasts Me with “the black dude,” never acknowledging Obama’s identity — juxtaposing the conceptual with the logical.
Further drawing on the nation’s sociohistorical anxieties Beatty leaves the novel’s conclusion ambiguous obfuscating the fate of Me. This gesture can be read as mirroring the open-endedness of Obama’s election, conveying a sense of consternation mapped onto the material value of Obama for people of color yet rich with post-racial symbolism and sentimentalism, if nothing else. Recounting the day after “the black dude was inaugurated,” in the paradoxically titled final chapter “Closure,” Beatty outlines a scene between Me and his nemesis, Foy Cheshire, to emphasize the frictions inherent in the reverberations of Obama’s election, again underlining its impact on the relationship between blacks and Americanness:
Foy Cheshire, proud as punch, driving around town in his coupe, honking his horn and waving an American flag. He wasn’t the only one celebrating; the neighborhood glee wasn’t O. J. Simpson getting acquitted or the Lakers winning the 2002 championship, but it was close. “Why are you waving the flag?” Why now? I’ve never seen you wave it before.” He said that he felt like the country, the United States of America had finally paid off its debts. “And what about the Native Americans? What about the Chinese, the Japanese, the Mexicans, the poor, the forests, the water, the air, the fucking California condor? When do they collect?” (289).
While this conclusion illustrates the potential for political solidarity, and ties together the social and the political, it leaves the hopes of the nation suspended, and more importantly, its debts unpaid.
Works Cited
Ashe, Bertram D. "Theorizing the Post-Soul Aesthetic: An Introduction." African American Review 41.4 (2007): 609-23. Web.
Baldwin, James. “The Art of Fiction No. 78.” Paris Review, no. 91, Spring 1984. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2994/the-art-of-fiction-no-78-james-baldwin Accessed 18 June 2016.
Beatty, Paul. The White Boy Shuffle. United States of America: Houghton Mifflin, 1996. Web.
Dickson-Carr, Darryl. "Taking the Offensive: The Quest for New Politics in Contemporary Black Satire." Canadian Review of American Studies 29.3 (1999): 1. Web.
Hall, Stuart, and Ferial Ghazoul. "Cultural Identity and Diaspora." Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics.32 (2012): 257. Web.
Maus, Derek C., editor, and James J. editor Donahue. Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity After Civil Rights. Jackson [Mississippi]: University Press of Mississippi, 2014. Web.
Sexton, Jared. "Proprieties of Coalition: Blacks, Asians, and the Politics of Policing." Critical Sociology
36.1 (2010): 87-108. Web.
Stallings, L. H. "Punked for Life: Paul Beatty's "the White Boy Shuffle" and Radical Black Masculinities." African American Review 43.1 (2009): 99-116. Web.
Weisenburger, Steven. Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel, 1930-1980. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1995. Print.
Wheaton, Deidre L. "Stay Black and Die: Examining Minority Minority Race Relations in Paul Beatty's Fiction." Ed. Josep M. Armengol. Men in Color: Racialized Masculinities in U.S. Literature and Cinema. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Pub., 2011. 101-20. Print.
Wolfe, Alexandra. "Novelist Paul Beatty on Writing and Satire; Paul Beatty on His Latest Book, 'the Sellout,' which Tackles Slavery and Segregation with Satire, and Why He Shuns Cellphones." Wall Street Journal (Online): n/a. May 23, 2015 2015. ABI/INFORM Complete, National Newspapers Core, The Wall Street Journal. Web. <http://search.proquest.com.lp.hscl.ufl.edu/docview/1682684523?accountid=10920>.
[1] Critics have debated whether there are any unifying and identifiable features to mark it as a movement. He notes specifically: “There is no organized or even loosely organized “movement” that collects these post-Civil Rights movement artists and places them under any sort of overtly political banner, let alone emancipatory banner” (618).
[2] Not to say that brooding is necessarily a metacritique and therefore deracination, rather, I’m suggesting that the site of the satire is widening the scope of and thus not the same thing as pushing back against the critique itself. That is the moment of the post-soul is not the moment of deracination.
[3] Sexton says of “racial blackness…as an affected, fetal way of being alive, both unborn and undead: blackness unbearable and unburiable.”
[4] Beatty defines unmitigated blackness as “essays passing for fiction…the realization that there are no absolutes, except when there are…the acceptance of contradiction not being a sin and a crime but a human frailty like split ends and libertarianism. Unmitigated Blackness is coming to the realization that as fucked up and meaningless as it all is, sometimes it’s the nihilism that makes life worth living.”
