Paul Beatty: The White Boy Shuffle

My third-grade teacher, Ms. Cegeny, liked to wear a shirt that read:

Whenever she wore it she seemed to pay special attention to me, Salvador Aguacaliente (the silent Latin kid who got to go home early on Cinco de Mayo), and Sheila Watanabe (the loudest Pledge of Allegiance sayer in the history of American education), taking care to point out the multiculturalist propaganda posted above the blackboard next to the printed and cursive letters of the alphabet: “Eracism — The sun doesn’t care what color you are.”

On hot stage-three smog-alert California days Ms. Cegeny would announce, “Okay, class, put away your pencils and take out your science books. Turn to page eighty-eight. Melissa, please read starting from ‘Fun with Sunshine and Thermodynamics.’” Melissa Schoopmann would begin in her deliberate relentless monotone. “This may sound funny … to the novice … third-grade scientist,… but sunshine is cool.… Without it … the earth … would be … as lifeless as a … Catholic funeral on a … rainy, dreary day.” I’d try to fall asleep, but it was too hot even to daydream. My sweat-soaked Suicidal Tendencies You Can’t Bring Me Down tour shirt clung to the inversion layer of grit on my skin. Melissa droned on. “Dark colors … such as … black absorb sunlight … and light colors … such as … white reflect sunlight.” I looked up and down my skinny dark brown arms and turned to my lab partner, Cecilia Peetemeyer, the palest kid in school. Cecilia’s skin was so transparent that one week during health Ms. Cegeny used Cecilia’s see-through skim-milk-white limbs to show the difference between arteries, capillaries, and veins.

“Cecilia, are you hot?” I asked.

“No.”

“Shit.”

“Gunnar, what was the last thing Melissa read?”

“Uh, she said um. She said dark colors soak up the sun’s rays through processes called conduction and convection and the lighter colors of the spectrum tend to alter the path of the radiation through reflection and refraction.”

“Good, I thought you weren’t paying attention. Melissa, please continue.”

Everything was multicultural, but nothing was multicultural. The class studied Asian styles of calculation by learning to add and subtract on an abacus and we then applied the same mathematical principles on Seiko calculators. Prompting my hand to go up and me to ask naively, “Isn’t the Seiko XL-126 from the same culture as the abacus?” Ms. Cegeny’s response was “No, we gave this technology to the Japanese after World War II. Modern technology is a Western construct.” Oh. To put me in my place further, Sheila Watanabe hummed “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty” loud enough for the whole class to hear.

One year during Wellness Week a MASH unit of city health workers set up camp in the gymnasium to ensure that America would have an able-bodied supply of future midlevel managers ready to lead the reinforcement brigades of minimum-wage foot soldiers to their capitalistic battle stations. A free-enterprise penologist was a physically fit one. We answered the patriotic call one girl and boy at a time. Allison Abramowitz and Aaron Aaronson were the first to go. Brave warriors, they left with no send-off party save the frightened faces of their classmates. Ten minutes later Allison returned unharmed. She skipped over to her desk, sat down, and covered a sly I-know-something-you-don’t smile with her hand. Kent Munson quickly asked for permission to sharpen his pencil. He dropped the pencil next to Allison and asked her what happened. She hissed, “None of your beeswax,” sending Kent slinking back to his seat defeated. When copycat and cootie-infested Katie Swickler tried the same technique, Allison greeted her with a message whispered in her ear. Then girls throughout the classroom giggled and smiled at Katie, thanking her for the reassurance. It was as if they were communicating through gender-specific telepathy, leaving us guys looking more confused than usual.

Then Aaron Aaronson walked in, his face drained of color, his arms stuck tightly to his sides, and a newly acquired tic violently tossing his head back at a sickeningly acute angle every two seconds. Zombiefied, he walked a few steps into the classroom, stopped, and shouted, “Oh shit, you guys. They touched my balls and made me cough.”

Ms. Cegeny ignored Aaron’s pederastic pronouncements, called two more names, and continued her lecture on the importance of living in a colorblind society. “Does anyone have an example of colorblind processes in American society?”

Ed Wismer raised his hand and said, “Justice.”

“Good. Anything else?”

Millicent Offerman, who as teacher’s pet spoke without raising her hand, shouted out, “The president sure seems to like people of color.”

“Anyone else think of anything that’s colorblind? Gunnar?”

“Dogs.”

“I believe that dogs are truly colorblind, but they’re born that way. Class, it’s important that we judge people for what?”

“Their minds!”

“And not their what?”

“Color!”

The response to Ms. Cegeny’s call was mostly soprano. I know none of the boy altos were into it — too busy cursing ourselves for wearing the same drawers two days in a row. Colorblind? I hoped the doctor would be totally blind, or he might pull down my underwear, see the brown skid marks on my white Montgomery Ward cotton briefs, and recommend me for placement in special education.

Eventually Ms. Cegeny called my name and I left to be examined by a quiet nurse and a doctor so old he may have cowritten the Hippocratic oath. I was weighed and measured. The doctor banged on my knees with a rubber tomahawk, then asked me to pull down my drawers. Ignoring my stains, he wrapped his trembling and wrinkled hand around my equally wrinkled scrotum. I didn’t flinch. Which surprised him.

“Anyone ever do this to you before, son?”

“No.”

“Do you know what I am doing, son?”

“Touching my balls.”

“Do you know why? Cough.”

“Ah-hem. To practice your juggling?”

“Oh, you’re one of those funny cool black guys, aren’t you. No, I’m testing you for a hernia. Cough.”

“Ah-hem! How do you test the girls?”

“I pinch their nipples and ask them to whistle. Pull up your pants and we’ll test your sight.”

I sat on a stool and read the eye chart with no problems. The nurse placed an open book on my lap and asked if I saw any numbers in the pattern of colored dots. I pointed out the yellow-orange eight-six in the sea of gray dots and asked the nurse what I was being tested for. The doctor stopped shaking long enough to interrupt the nurse and answer, “Colorblindness.”

“Our teacher says we’re supposed to be colorblind. That’s hard to do if you can see color, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, I’d say so, but I think your teacher means don’t make any assumptions based on color.”

“Cross on the green and not in between.”

“They’re talking about human color.”

“So?”

“So just pretend that you don’t see color. Don’t say things like ‘Black people are lecherous, violent, natural-born criminals.’”

“But I’m black.”

“Oh, I hadn’t noticed.”

I went back to class and told the still-nervous boys in the back rows whose last names began with the letters L through Z that the physical wasn’t too bad other than when the doctor measures your dick with a ruler and calls out to the nurse, “Penis size normal,” or “teeny-weeny,” or “fucking humungous.” Ann Kurowski, who was twice as blind as Helen Keller but determined to go through life without wearing glasses, asked me if I remembered the letters on the bottom of the eye chart. I told her “F-E-C-E-S” and opened my primer to the story about a war between a herd of black elephants and a herd of white elephants.