Afro-pessimism produced at least one good novel
(It's Paul Beatty's THE SELLOUT)
Back in December I filed my review of Percival Everett's new novel James. About a month later, for my book club, I read Paul Beatty's 2015 novel, The Sellout, and I was surprised to discover that the novel is quite similar to James. However, I disliked James, while I quite enjoyed The Sellout.1
Both novels are riffs on Afro-pessimism—the notion that Black people are an eternally subaltern caste in America, in a way that's highly resistant to any change in the laws or in social mores.2
In James, this insistence rings a bit false, as I detail in my review. The novel begins by imagining a playful reality where enslaved Black people pretend to be stupid, so they can avoid getting in trouble with white people. The conceit is that Black and white people can lead completely separate lives, psychologically, even as they inhabit the same space. But...the conceit falls apart almost immediately when James learns he is going to be sold down-river and separated from his wife and children.
The novel goes through various adventures, and James insists throughout that there's no difference between freedom and slavery, because white people will always be in charge, will always keep Black people down. But...in the end, he and his wife and child are free. That's how the book ends, with James free to speak for himself for the first time. And it happens because of...the Civil War. Change is possible, even as the book insists it's not. The performance comes off as somewhat dishonest! But that's all in my review.
The Sellout has an equally fantastic conceit. The book is told in an erudite first-person voice, by a Black guy who's intelligent and highly-educated and (because of a court settlement for his father's murder) financially independent. But he feels disaffected and shut out by society.
He lives in a mostly-black neighborhood in LA, Dickens, which has been deprived of any official identity through some governmental shenanigans. And the main character, Bonbon, decides that the only way to preserve the psychological and social cohesion of the Black people in this neighborhood is to...reinstitute segregation. With the help of a bus-driver friend, he puts up signs directing Black people to the back of the bus. He also puts up signage around town claiming a new white-only school is going to open up.
As a result, grades at the school increase, and ordinary Black people feel a new sense of confidence and security.
The idea that Black people would be better off if they were separate is an old idea, but in its current iteration seems to come from Critical Race Theory. One of the founders of CRT, Derrick Bell, was famous for saying that Brown vs. Board of Education was decided wrongly—the problem with separate-but-equal was merely that the schools weren't actually equal.3 The solution was to make them equal, in terms of resources.
The reason that The Sellout works is that...it's mostly a comedy. Here's an example of the voice, which is quite lively and engaging.
[The average American] wants to believe that Shakespeare wrote all those books, that Lincoln fought the Civil War to free the slaves and the United States fought World War II to rescue the Jews and keep the world safe for democracy, that Jesus and the double feature are coming back. But I’m no Panglossian American. And when I did what I did, I wasn’t thinking about inalienable rights, the proud history of our people. I did what worked, and since when did a little slavery and segregation ever hurt anybody, and if so, so fucking be it.
The ideas are thought-provoking, but they're mostly played for laughs. The book doesn't try to bring slavery and rape and murder into it, like James does. The fact is, Afro-pessimism is an inherently bleak philosophy, so if you pair it with bleak circumstances, the result is extremely depressing.
At the end, Bonbon is prosecuted by the Supreme Court for violating peoples' civil rights, and we never hear how the case actually gets decided.
Any regime of legal segregation would probably be...you know...pretty bad. It's hard to separate legal and social and economic power. For instance, if you had a regime with separate schools, then couldn't you argue that the white schools should be supported by the white tax base and the black schools by the black tax base? What makes this idea per se wrong or unfair?
If one group has a lot less money and political power, then if institutions are segregated by race, that race's institutions will be correspondingly weaker—that's exactly why separate usually isn't equal.
A few years back, my book club read another book about this, The Color of Money, which was about the failure of Black banks. And this book made the point that...houses are worth less if they are in Black neighborhoods. In fact, houses are worth less if they are owned by Black people! The moment a Black person moves into a house, its value drops. So if your bank only gives mortgages to Black people, then it's engaging in an inherently uneconomical activity, because you're loaning money to Black people to buy homes (some of which were previously owned by white people) and the moment they buy those homes, the house drops in value, and suddenly you're holding a mortgage that’s underwater.
But The Sellout doesn't have to deal with these issues, because of where it ends—there are essentially no white people in the book, and it's mostly a book about debates between various Black people.
James, by importing similar ideas into a sphere where white power is omnipresent, almost immediately collapses under its incoherence, and honestly becomes very depressing.
The Sellout isn't depressing, because it's a game. It's a community of people coming together and having fun, sticking it to the man (by embracing segregation). The narration is extremely lively and it's full of jokes and asides. I recommend it.
With Afro-pessimism there are some larger questions. The first is whether it's true: are Black people always doomed to be on the bottom of American society?
But even if you accept that Afro-pessimism is correct (which I do not), then there’s a second order question: Is some form of segregation actually the best response? To me, that doesn’t follow.
On the level of practical politics, Afro-pessimism doesn't make sense. If you start off by saying there is a regime that is always attempting to destroy Black people, and then you allow that regime to make laws that specifically target Black people, then...you're just handing them a weapon with which to hurt you. Why would an inherently racist regime implement segregation fairly? It seems quite silly, and I think, honestly, that the silliness is exactly why the idea got so much play. Afro-pessimism was so provocative that you couldn’t help wanting to discuss it.
But with The Sellout the book is so tongue-in-cheek that you can easily say the author wasn’t serious, it was just a thought experiment. And on that level I think the book works quite well.
The book is only ten years old, but it feels much older—the assumption in the book was that the kind of liberal technocracy embodied by Obama would last forever, and this was an assumption that would be shattered just a year after the book was published. But that doesn’t mean it’s a bad book. It honestly means the book is very good, because it so accurately captures the time and place in which it arose.
Afterword
The newsletter depends primarily on what I’m reading these days. Some reading projects take longer to bake than others do. I continue to read The Mahabharata—I just finished the penultimate volume—and I have several ideas for wrap-up posts.
And I’ve also been reading so much 19th-century American literature! Not just Mark Twain, but also James Fenimore Cooper, and now Herman Melville. What to do? It’s kind of a conundrum. Honestly, I’m thankful my reading has stayed within the realm of the high-brow. At some point I was tempted to start re-reading deeply uncool sci-fi standards (like Isaac Asimov).
The newsletter certainly has a prescribed focus—it doesn’t discuss electoral politics, TV, movies, commercial fiction, contemporary nonfiction, or any number of other things a newsletter like this could write about. But mostly…it’s linked by my voice and my interests.
Thank you so much for subscribing. There is a paid option, and I publish paid posts once every other week—they’re distinctly different from the unpaid posts both in tone and content. Here’s a recent example:
P.S. A story of mine, “World-Weariness”, made the Locus Recommended Reading List (a first for me). It came out the young adult anthology We Mostly Come Out At Night (Ed. Rob Costello), which also made the Locus list.
My understanding of Afro-pessimism comes from reading a book with that title by Frank B. Wilderson III.
This New Yorker article on Derrick Bell is quite good. The author, Jelani Cobb, describes an article where Bell reconsiders Brown v. Board:
“Silent Covenants” also features an alternative ruling in Brown. In this version…the Court holds that enforcing integration would spark such discord that it would likely fail, so the Justices issue a mandate to make Black and white schools equal, and create a board of oversight to insure that school districts comply. Bell says in the book that he wrote the ruling when a friend asked him whether the Court could have framed its decision “differently from, and better than” the one it chose to hand down.
I haven't read The Sellout, but Beatty's White Boy Shuffle was pretty amazing.
I loved The Sellout. When are we getting another Paul Beatty novel?