Paul Beatty - The White Boy Shuffle

I called Dexter Waverly, president of the citywide black student union, and asked when the next Ambrosia meeting was. The black student union was originally called Umoja, but the name was changed because of the whites’ inability to pronounce the Swahili word for unity. Dexter cleared his throat. “Mhotep, son of Africa. The next meeting is Monday night at eight in the School of Management basement. Come early and we’ll fit you for a dashiki. You can play a talking drum, can’t you?”

I purposely arrived late at the gathering. Harvard, BU, MIT Negroes were wearing loud African garb over their Oxford shirts and red suspenders, drinking ginger beer, and using their advertising skills to plan how best to package the white man’s burden. “No alcohol, brother,” someone shouted. I chugged my real beer, burped, and took a seat in the back, picking up a discarded agenda from the floor. At the top of the sheet was the Ambrosia motto, “The happy slave has a right to be a slave, but is still a slave nonetheless.” I could hear my mother on the phone: “Join, Gunnar, sounds like an intelligent bunch of young people.”

The Ambrosia members outshouting one another about how brave they’d be fighting on the front lines of America’s race war reminded me of a small-town volunteer fire department shining an already shiny engine and bragging about how brave they’d be if they ever fought a real fire. “But are you ready to die and kill for your people?” said chief firefighter Dexter Waverly. Dexter wore a red dashiki trimmed with miniature elephant tusks and tightly gripped the sides of the lectern with both hands. Rallymaster, they called him: able to form a coalition at a moment’s notice, knows the copy center with the cheapest rates, media friendly, dynamic speaker.

Bored with the racial braggadocio, Dexter raised a hand for quiet, and the muttering stopped. I wanted to dislike Dexter — it was obvious he was a charlatan — but I was awestruck at how such an ugly motherfucker, with an eczema condition so severe that when he furrowed his brow tiny flakes of skin fell to the lectern, could hold an audience spellbound with a single gesture. I could hear his eyeballs crinkle as he looked up from the one-item agenda and scanned his audience. He seemed so angst-ridden I wanted to throw him a dog biscuit.

“Brothers and sisters” — uh-oh — “Comrade Essie Brooks’s combination fashion show and literacy program is a wonderful idea. A stroke of genius, of black feminine genius, of rump-rolling, look-at-that-butter, greasy, you-know-how-we-do, big-black-titty genius. Praise due to Sister Essie Brooks and all sisters like her.”

The men barked and stamped their feet. The women swooned and said loud amens, raising their hands in the air like castaways trying to flag down an ocean liner. I sat transfixed, trying to figure out how Dexter, a man whom I was seeing for the first time not in the cuddly company of a white woman, was the Emperor Jones of the Ivy League. Usually dating exclusively white was, for a black person, the equivalent of multiplying a lifetime of accomplishments by zero. It didn’t matter what your previous accomplishments were; abolitionist, Motown diva, Olympic figure-skater, inventor of the sky hook, you had zilch stature amongst the folks. Dexter managed to be the school Mandingo and maintain his race loyalty.

Sometimes I’d catch him in the back alleys with the white woman of the moment. He’d greet me with a hearty “Hey, black,” and place a reverent fist over his heart. If I looked quizzically at his date, he’d flash the “I know it’s hard to tell” smile and say, “No cause for alarm, brother. Sister Cindy Zwittledorf is of Brazilian descent. Third World solidarity, my brother.” To validate his claim further, Dexter would wave a small parade flag representing the woman’s supposed place of origin in tiny circles. “Viva Uruguay! Tres hurras por Argentina! Oyé como va Bolivia!”

I admit I admired his chutzpah and ingenuity. When Yoshiko and I walked the campus, I sometimes wilted under the evil stares, cowering behind Yoshiko’s back and covering my face in a fit of fake sneezes or forced yawns.

“Why you always sneeze when black people are around?”

“I’m allergic, baby.”

“Go ’head, Dexter,” a woman in front shouted. Dexter nodded in appreciation and continued.

“The fashion show — literacy program will use the Afro-chic to uplift the Afro-weak. What we propose is not a marriage — marriage, if you’re lucky, only lasts a lifetime. What we propose is an intellectual inheritance, an eternal trust fund for minds yet unborn. Young, black, not-yet-tainted-by-the-toxic-dyes-of-self-hatred minds. We talking tabula vivé la rasa. Nowadays, when you talk to the teachers of our youth, they say, ‘The young bastards and bastardettes can’t learn. They have short attention spans.’ Well, then you need to lengthen the attention span. If the river widens, you extend the bridge. When man invented the jet, did they say, ‘No, man, you cannot fly these supersonic jets, the runway is too short — you can’t take off, and if you manage to get the plane off the ground, you can’t land’? No, they lengthened the runway. And we gonna lengthen the fashion runway for our little black jets. Stretch their attention spans with fine black folks modeling black clothes. Each model male and fee-male — I say fee-male ’cause it cost to be a black woman — each model will carry a sign with a grammar lesson on it. I can see the enthusiasm on the children’s faces now. Imagine with me, if you will, the fine and sexy premed major light-skinned Linda Rucker, in a little one-piece bathing suit carrying a sign that reads ‘ i before e except after c. ’ There’ll be booty and learning for days. You think when the boys go to the bathroom and start beating off they going to be saying, ‘Goddamn, that bitch was fine’? No. They gone be pulling on their growing black manhood saying, “ I before e except after c. ” Now you know we not going to cheat our young African women out of their thrill. We’ll have the bronze god and star running back Thor Haverlock in bikini briefs thunder down the runway with a sign reading “A sentence is a complete thought” balanced on his bulge. When the girls get those hot flashes that accompany puberty, you better believe they’re gonna be fantasizing in complete sentences. ‘Jesus Christ, that boy is fine as hell.’ Anybody have any other ideas for grammatical phrases we can use? Gunnar Kaufman, esteemed poet, first-time Ambrosia attendee, what about you, my brother?”

“How about ‘In general, singular subjects connected by or, nor, either/or, or neither/nor take a singular verb if both subjects are singular, a plural verb if subjects are plural’?”

I left to a scattering of sotto voce insults: “Nigger crazy, he trying to confuse the youth”; “Smart-alecky fool need to be playing basketball, that’s what he need to be doing.”

When I reached the door, Jamal Vickers handed me a manila-colored flier and sneered, “Why don’t you join Concoction? You think you better than everyone else.” Concoction was an organization of mixed-race kids who felt ostracized by both white and colored students.

CONCOCTION — THE HUMAN STUDENT UNION

The primordial soup’s on! Tired of being stewed because of your biracial heritage?

The jambalaya of ethnic duplicity too complicated for your “black” friends?

The reality of the American melting pot too hot for your “white” amigos?

Come and be a part of Concoction’s goulash and celebrate your ethnic hybridization.

Future Topics of Discussion:

• How to check African-American/Latino/Asian on your job application and rise above your employer’s stereotypes by asserting your biraciality in the workplace in a nonethnic manner.