The Sellout

Racism continues to represent performativity as the phrase “too many Mexicans” turns into a line from a script that people say to account for bad outcomes. Me explains:

It’s a bromide for every unlicensed contractor tired of being underbid and refusing to blame their lack of employment on shoddy workmanship, nepotistic hiring practices, and a long list of shitty online references (139).

Another way to view the term is as a tagline from an advertisement. Like a slogan from a catchy commercial, the phrase pops up in characters’ heads without conscious thought. In this context, it links to Capitalism’s Power to Co-opt Activism. The racist remark undermines racial and class solidarity, short-circuiting any productive thought about the complex realities of class, gentrification, and exploitation by offering an easy scapegoat.

As Charisma Molina, the first character to utter the phrase in the book, is of Mexican descent, deepening the book’s exploration of two themes: the tension between Racial and Personal Identity and Capitalism’s Power to Co-opt Activism. Having achieved a position of authority as principle of Chaff Middle School, Charisma is eager to exempt herself from the group described by that racist catch-phrase. In this instance, she seeks to cast her personal identity as separate from a marginalized racial identity. Capitalism incentivizes people to see themselves as individuals in competition with one another, rather than as communities working in solidarity to improve their collective lives. Rather than work with others to resist racism, Charisma here chooses to pretend that it doesn’t apply to her.

Mr. Edmunds performs remorse for his supposed racist behavior when he turns in his “shiny new Teach for America button” like a “television cop handing in his badge and gun” (147). Teach for America is a real-life program that college students can join to teach for a couple of years at schools in less affluent communities. In the scene, the button becomes a prop, and Mr. Edmunds turns into an actor exiting the stage or dramatically walking “off into the squall” (147). The implication here is that Mr. Edmunds’ solitary protest is more performance than activism—its purpose is not to improve anyone’s life but to Mr. Edmunds look good and feel good.

Beatty also continues to juxtapose real-life tragedies with absurd reenactments. Me remembers an instance from his childhood when he told his dad that “there was no racism in America. Only equal opportunity that [B]lack people kick aside because we don’t want to take responsibility for ourselves” (158). The statement itself does not reflect Me’s actual views but reads as a calculated act of teenage rebellion against his father’s tutelage. To prove him wrong, his dad drives home from California to Mississippi (a very long drive) where, in 1955, a group of white men kidnapped, tortured, and lynched Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy, for allegedly whistling at, touching, or flirting with a white woman.

Me’s version of Till’s heinous murder is absurdly different—it’s a gag involving vomit and classical music. The hyperbolic diction turns the characters into cartoons. F. K. “let[s] go a wolf whistle so lecherous and libidinous it curled both the white woman’s pretty painted toes and the dainty red ribbon in her blond hair” (161). The scene features irony—Rebecca reciprocates F. K.’s advances, and the white men don’t care that they go off to have sex. The irony continues when the Black gas station attendant won’t let Me use the bathroom. The irony doubles as the reason doesn’t have to do with race but the fact that Me is not a paying customer. The irony triples as the abandoned bathroom Me uses is marked for “whites only”—a trace of the days of Jim Crow that no one got around to erasing. The bewildering experience arises from F. K.’s habitual bewilderment. Like Hominy, he is trapped in a past era, not realizing that while racism has not gone away, its outward forms have changed.

Irony persists with the impact of the segregation signs on the bus. At first glance, it appears as if overt racism improves the lives of the people of Dickens. Charisma sees it as a plus—she asks Me to segregate her middle school. As the school is already de facto segregated (there are no white students), Me uses imagination and installs a fake whites-only school—named The Wheaton School—across from Chaff. The names evoke the expression “separating the wheat from the chaff,” which describes the process of winnowing grain, with the wheat prized for its economic and nutritional value and the chaff cast aside as worthless. The school is a set piece—a performance—but its mere imaginary presence inspires the Chaff students to work harder at their studies. The fact that the Chaff school is already de facto segregated highlights an idea at the core of the book’s satire: The racist structures that characterized America in the Jim Crow era have not gone away; they’ve merely been rendered invisible and unspeakable, a form of “progress” that helps no one.

This section ends with a public book-burning—another scene of almost mythic historical badness, associated with both Nazi Germany and the Jim Crow South, recast as an apparently good thing. Importantly, the books are burned not for ideological reasons but simply because the school’s traditional bonfire requires material to burn, and Foy Cheshire’s sanitized editions of classic literature are handy. The image is emblematic of this perplexing section of the book, as one symbol of racial progress after another is shown to be hollow, an empty promise.