The Sellout.

I, like a lot of people, was upset when Trump became President. I was a senior in college when he won, and I felt angry because here were all of the people around me who I trusted not to echo the ideas of this man, and sure, maybe they didn’t, but enough people in this country did for him to become our President, and were we looking at the same guy? If so, then how did all of these people see me?  

I felt angry because I presumed in my tiny liberal bubble on my conservative college campus in the conservative state of Texas, I was safe, but the people in this bubble with me—mostly well-intentioned and White—did not have the same stakes in this that I did, and so when he won, it was a bummer for them, but it meant more than that for me. It meant people could hurt me, and the President of the United States probably would not condemn but encourage them. It made me remember how quickly time can fold on you when you’re Black, how quickly all of the progress in the world can be pulled like a rug from underneath you, leaving you confused and—this whole time?—contained. 

I wasn’t the most at risk—there were people he was more set on hurting than me—but it was more than an idea game for me, and so when my friends were bummed out, I felt angry that I, without choosing it, had more to lose.

When I began to take creative writing seriously the next year, with my work, I wanted to try to make White people understand how it feels to be vulnerable because of the way you look.

I wanted to try to make them understand how it feels to not be White so I wrote this book where the racial power dynamics between Black and White people were flipped. In this novel’s world, White people were oppressed like Black people have been, including—God help my twenty-two-year-old self—slavery. 

And from this seven year distance, I know it was not the best approach to try to make White people understand Black oppression by making them (in this fictional world!) slaves. I know it’s how White supremacists justify their violence against Black bodies—they assure the press that they were just preemptively protecting themselves. This world I was making in my work was one that Whiteness gets off on imagining: one where someone else has decided to be as cruel and violent as Whiteness is, to bully the bully. 

I know now that by creating a world like that, I was just giving Whiteness more fuel for its fire, but I was still a kid in a lot of ways when I wrote it. I was angry, and I wanted to make something that White people could look at and fear so that they could understand the very real life fear everyone else has to deal with because of Whiteness. I thought, How can they ever understand how we feel if they can’t even bear it happening to them in a made up story?

It wasn’t the best approach, I know that now, but I think what’s hilarious in retrospect is that when I was telling people about this project, everyone recommended me books where Black people had slaves, but the slaves were always other Black people, never White. They didn’t even recommend to me stories where Black people were fighting back against Whiteness like The Spook Who Sat By the Door or Imperium in Imperio or Django Unchained. The book people recommended to me most was The Sellout, and so the first time I read it, I was distracted by how little it had to do with what I was trying to do—I was trying to flip everything so that White people can understand how it feels to be unsafe, and in The Sellout, a deranged old Black man insists on being a slave to a younger Black man because he’d saved the old man’s life once. And this “slave” doesn’t do any work and is much more interested in the performance of humiliation and subservience than he is in actually being a slave. 

At the time, I was like, What does this have to do with me and my project? Did the people who recommended this to me even read this book, and if so, what are they trying to say? 

But now, with some distance and with my current project that approaches things with humor, I see how brilliant this book is. 

Maybe to detangle what we’ve taken to be given about how things are, it’s better to make fun of the setup than to try to flip it. Instead of making it Black people who are ruling over White people or women who are ruling over men—maybe it’s more salient and effective to make fun of the way things are, to laugh at people who think that the way they relate to you is objective and reasonable, impossible to change. Take the entire enormous joke that Trump has been and perhaps always will be. Maybe humor is what makes power slippery, what makes everyone begin to question why the powerful are the ones with power in the first place.

What I love about The Sellout now is that A) it’s hilarious, and B) it questions White assumptions about Black people while also, the entire novel, being an inside joke for Black people, tender and loving and teasing and precise. It is specific, and it is absurd, and if it teaches, it’s almost accidental, instead invested mostly, perhaps, in having a good time. 

I want to have a good time with my work, and I’ve learned enough now to understand that it’s not my responsibility to teach White people anything. If there is going to be learning, perhaps it needs to be by proxy, accidentally, while we’re all laughing whether we know why or not. 

Image: FSG