Paul Beatty - The White Boy Shuffle

“My elemen … elmo … my what?”

“Just stop patronizing me and do your job. Treat me as an individual, not like some stray cat that you feed once a day.”

It had been a long time since I’d communicated with white people who weren’t athletes or police officers, and here were goo-gobs of them yammering in the halls and blowing wispy bangs off their foreheads. I meshed in well. It was like swimming; you never forget how to raise your voice a couple of octaves, harden your r’s, and diphthong the vowels: “Deeeewwuuuude. Maaaaiin. No waaaaaeeey.” Whether they slouched or walked upright like proud Homo erectus cutouts from the encyclopedia, these kids were so casual. Most of them never had to look over their shoulders a day in their lives until they saw us get off the bus. I was envious. When no one was looking, I found myself trying to blow puffs of air past my wrinkled brow or emulating that quivering headshake, freeing imaginary blond locks from my eyes.

It was sad to watch us troll through the halls, a conga line of burlesque self-parody, all of us affecting our white-society persona of the day. Most days we morphed into waxen African-Americans. Perpetually smiling scholastic lawn jockeys, repeating verbatim the prosaic commandments of domesticity:

Thou shalt worship no god other than whiteness.

Thou shalt not disagree with anything a white person says.

When traveling in the company of a white person, thou shalt always maintain a respectful distance of two paces to the rear.

If traveling by car for lunch at McDonald’s with three or more white human deities, thou shalt never ride in the front seat nor request to change the radio station.

Those niggers most afflicted by white supremacyosis changed their names from Raymond to Kelly or Winifred to Megan. They walked around campus shunning the uncivilized niggers and talking in bad Cockney accents. Listening to teens who’ve been no closer to England than the Monty Python show saying, “Blimey, Oy-ive gowht a blooming ’edache” will bring any Negro with a shred of self-respect to tears.

Some situations called not for ethnic obfuscation but for rubbing burnt cork over our already dusky features and taking the stage as the blackest niggers in captivity. We pleaded for academic leniency: “Mistah Boss, sir. I’z couldenst dues my homework ’cause welfare came and took my baby brudder to the home and he had all the crayons.” We performed with vaudevillian panache, like adolescent interlocutors entertaining the troops back from the Rhine. We gave goofy white kids the soul shake, caught footballs, and sang in the hallways.

On weekends Mom forced me to pal around with the Valley bon vivants. “Gunnar, I want you to hang out with those nice boys from school today.”

I bristled. “Ma, make up your mind. You moved us out here. Later for those peckerwoods.”

“What’s the statute of limitations for safecracking, seven years?”

“That’s fucked up, Ma.”

I’d go into my “Hey, guy” mode and meet my Caucasian crew in neutral areas like Venice Beach or Melrose Avenue and hang out on the strip, eating cheeseburgers and window shopping.

“Stay black, nigger,” Scoby would call out as I boarded the bus. Scoby had a standing invitation to come along, but he always declined. Psycho Loco also refused, unless I agreed to set the white boys up for a robbery.

“And what exactly does ‘stay black’ mean, Nick?”

“It means be yourself, what else could it possibly mean?”

The arrogance of the white kids was enervating and I soon tired of their unspoken noblesse oblige, the subtle one-upsmanship. For instance, Danny Kraft was always bragging that he could name the capital of any country in the world.

“Test me, Gunnar, test me.”

“Portugal?”

“Lisbon.”

“Poland?”

“Warsaw.”

“Luxembourg?”

“Luxembourg, ha.”

“Djibouti?”

“What?”

“Djibouti? Little spot near Ethiopia and Somalia.”

“Isn’t the capital Abu Dhabi?”

“Nope. How about Kiribati?”

“That one’s Abu Dhabi.”

“You’re a dumb fuck. I thought white people were supposed to be smart.”

“Well, ask me some real countries.”

“What are ‘real countries’? Places where real people live? White people? What’s the capital of the Maldives? Guinea? Burkina Faso? Laos? Well, motherfucker, what are the capitals? Goddamn jingoistic jerk.”

The most important lesson I learned at El Campesino was that I wasn’t in arrears to the white race. No matter how much I felt indebted to white folks, I owed them nothing. My attitude changed. I began treating the bus ride out to the Valley as a daily vacation. The school’s library rivaled most college libraries and I turned it into my personal athenaeum. I buried myself in Senghor, Céline, Baraka, Dos Passos, decompressing and reacclimating myself to myself, like a diver just returned from a deep-sea sojourn. In the library I could avoid white boys asking me if I thought blacks were closer to gorillas while tufts of unruly chest hair crept past their collars like weeds starving for sunlight. I could hide from smarmy college basketball recruiters who’d never think to look for a black athlete in the library. Ditch classes where the teachers talked past me, saying things like “It’s not hard to be a millionaire. What are your parents’ houses worth, five hundred thousand dollars? See, that’s a half mill right there.”

I couldn’t escape basketball practice. At two o’clock every afternoon Coach Logan’s assistant, Mr. Wurlitz, went around to all the classes I missed and gathered my assignments. At two-thirty he kowtowed and politely asked if I would like to join the rest of the team for practice.

I wasn’t the basketball team’s only hired gun. In hopes of dominating Valley basketball, the El Campesino Real Conquistadores brought in Anthony Price from Gardena, Anita Appleby from Torrance, and Tommy Mendoza from Echo Park. A few white players would get giddy on bus rides to games, confiding in me that playing with black players was a dream come true. Singing in the shower and jiving in the gym — what more could there be to life?

* * *

Early in my senior year I sat down for my weekly career-planning session with Ms. Baumgarten. This time she didn’t pester me about applying to the DeVry School of Technology but looked up from her desk, shaking her head as if I’d done something wrong. “I think they might have made a mistake,” she said, handing me an opened envelope. My SAT scores had arrived. According to the tables, my verbal score was in the ninety-eighth percentile and my math score in the eighty-seventh.

“What you mean, mistake?”

“Gunnar, you haven’t been to calculus once in the past two months, and Mr. Kissio says you wrote an English Lit. composition called ‘Machisma Hermeneutics — Hemingway and the Hacienda Gringolust, An Obsession with the Latino Male.’ There’s no way you could get these kinds of scores.”

Soon letters from colleges addressed “Dear Scholar” instead of “Waddup to the best guard in the nation” began arriving. Now academic recruiters from various schools across the nation called me at home or visited me at school during lunch. The armed forces academies, Harvard, and Boston University were the most aggressive pursuers. I had a good time with the stuffy admirals and majors. After giving me the standard make-the-world-safe-for-democracy spiel, they’d ask what interested me. Removing a picture of Oliver North from my wallet, I’d say in a hushed tone, “Covert ops. Not your average banana republic puppet government stuff — I want to form a rebel army of Laplanders and overthrow all those neutral Scandinavian wussy socialists.” I soon stopped getting letters and visits from West Point and Annapolis.