Examples Of Segregation In The Sellout

The Sellout’s Segregation
The Sellout is a novel by Paul Beatty which rotates around an anonymous, African American Narrator, whose journey leads him to reinstate segregation. The novel challenges conventional social and cultural norms, and prompts conversations about race. In the, ‘The Sellout’, Beatty incorporates blatant racism and humorous stereotypes to highlight the dilemmas of identity formation for minorities in the United States. He fuses irony and satire to challenge beliefs and customs about racism in the American community at large, and through this, propels the plot, making the reader think about the questions put forth by the ‘Nigger Whisperer’ (the Narrator’s father), “Who I am?” and “how do I become myself?”.

The novel follows

He decides that Dickens needs a sister city, and eventually proposes that Dickens be the sister city of the ‘Lost City of White Male Privilege’. He argues that white privilege itself no longer is prolific and uses the foil literary device to compare the two.
The existence of the ‘Lost City of White Male Privilege’, the narrator contends, “is often denied by many (mostly privileged white males)” (Beatty 149). Again, Beatty uses tongue-in-cheek humor to call out popular beliefs and claims that it will become a forgotten, fragmented and fractured idea, until someone deems it helpful to revive and reuse, and the same had happened to Dickens. Here, Beatty expresses the profundity of the nature of racism and breaks stereotypes by abnegating the presence of conventional stereotypes.

In The Sellout, the city of Dickens is central to the plot. Its deletion pushes the storyline forward and leaves many residents of the city, such as the Narrator and Hominy, heartbroken. The characters, Hominy in particular feel downtrodden and like a cheap commodity, to be used at will, and so he becomes something of a ‘cheap commodity’ himself. He believes that “when Dickens disappeared, [he] disappeared” (Beatty 77). Jenkins felt that sometimes we “just have to accept who we are and act accordingly. [Jenkins] is a slave. That’s who I am” (Beatty 77). The Narrator is utterly shocked and to restore the city’s pride and the good health of its peoples, the Narrator embarks on a journey, segregating and discriminating as he goes. Surprisingly, the Narrator’s policies seem to have a profound and positive meaning as they help turn around the sullen mood and feeling in Dickens, as well as improve employment and graduation rates (Beatty 163). Moreover, the segregative policies bring out about a rarely seen unity among the people. On Hood Day, Gangs would now “relive fights that changed history [...] and afterward they meet up [...] at the rec centre [...] and reaffirm the peace” (Beatty 233). The novel ends on a higher note, with Dickens being ‘re-established’ and the Narrator recounting a story from an evening