Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from December, 2018

Seeming white

In the movie  Sorry To Bother You, there is a reoccurring trope of the "white voice" in which the African-American characters speak in a manner that is stereotypically white in order to be more successful with their telemarketing. While this is a fairly unique idea within the books that we have read so far, it is by no means an idea that they made up themselves. One more example of this from pop-culture recently is a comedian named Josh-Johnson (I think he's come up in class before). He is an African-American comedian and one joke that he frequently makes is that he sounds white when he talks. One story he likes to tell about himself sounding white is about his search for a job. He says that when he is looking for jobs and doing interviews he always gets jobs when his interview is over the phone. Then he says that when he finally shows up to work his employers always give him a weird look, saying that he thinks "we both know what happened." Anyways, this whole

Humor

White Boy Shuffle  is probably my favorite of the books that we've read this year so far (not that I didn't like the others but this is the book that we've read so far where I've been tempted to read ahead. Maybe that's also because the readings are slightly shorter). I think one of the reasons that this book is so striking to all of us is how different it feels compared to the other books that we have read so far this year. It talks about similar topics as the others but (so far) it's not a sad book, at least not on the surface. The beginning of White Boy Shuffle is really, really funny in a way that even the other books we've read this year that contain satire never achieved. But this humor doesn't seem to have come at any kind of price with the messages the book sends. Beatty still somehow manages to work stereotypes and other racial issues into the novel and he does it so seamlessly that it would be easy to miss some of them. The way the humor is u