School is a Joke

There is no question that The White Boy Shuffle is a funny novel. Beatty has a sense of humor that is very witty and brutally honest. A lot of the funniest scenes center around Beatty poking fun at the education system. This satire targets the hypocrisy of schools' policies when they try to be all-inclusive.

We see this from the very beginning. At his elementary school, his teacher repeats to the students over and over how they all need to be colorblind. Her favorite shirt has colors of skin crossed out and "human" written at the bottom. These methods are very idealistically progressive. In reality, they are not as effective as the teacher thinks. Gunnar is a very perceptive third-grader and calls her bluff with comments about dogs being colorblind. He notices how she pays special attention to the black, asian, and latino kids when she wears the shirt. Beatty adds even more irony when the kids are visited by some doctors and are tested for literal colorblindness. The medical professionals tell Gunnar that colorblindness is bad and when Gunnar expresses the discrepancy between their beliefs and the teacher's, the doctors explain to him that he should just pretend not to see color.

Flash forward ten years in the future and Gunnar is still experiencing this hypocritical multicultural education. At Boston University, Gunnar is fawned over by his classmates and teacher about his poetry. In his creative writing class, there's a student that claims that Gunner is her favorite poet. When Gunnar points out that her statement contradicts what she'd said before about someone else being her favorite poet, she explains that she was just ashamed before to say that her favorite poet is a black poet. These students that are supposed to be educated and open-minded are too embarrassed to associate themselves with a black man who writes poetry. However, they are incredibly proud to have Gunnar and Scoby on their basketball team because they're black.

Like Gunnar, Beatty uses his ability to be funny to grab the reader's attention and call out the education system. Unfortunately, the novel doesn't end as funny as it began. Gunnar and Scoby stop seeing the hilarious irony in the way society works and the pressure to be the funny, cool black guy becomes too much.

The White Boy Shuffle

The White Boy Shuffle is a novel about a young black man growing up on the west coast. When we started the book I was confused about the title. Why is the book called The White Boy Shuffle if the main character is African American?

"The White Boy Shuffle" is (according to Urban Dictionary) an "ungainly or comical dancing style". The name comes from the stereotype that white people are bad at dancing. Gunnar explains this near the end of Chapter 6 when he is at a club with Scoby and Psycho Loco. Gunnar does a "barely acceptable, simple side-to-side step...[He] wasn't funky but [he] was no longer disrupting the groove."

I'm trying to figure out why Beatty chose this phrase as the title to his novel. Maybe he thinks it's representative of Gunnar's life. The novel so far has covered Gunnar's experiences growing up as a black kid and how his life contrasts between Santa Monica and Los Angeles. The transition to the "hood" was extremely awkward to say the least, much like the dance Gunnar was doing. Even the word "shuffle" invokes a sense of discomfort. Gunnar got made fun of and beaten up for acting so much like an outsider to the West LA culture. He was too much of a "white boy" to be accepted immediately.

It was definitely a shock to go from being the '"cool black guy" to being the butt of every joke. In Santa Monica he was the blackest kid and in his new neighborhood he's the whitest. "Shuffle" could also refer to this change in location, like when you shuffle cards. Although, when you shuffle cards, the goal is to end up with a random order of the cards. There's no longer a logical order and it's out of your control. Maybe not totally yet, but Gunnar is starting to adopt an attitude where he just leaves everything up to fate. He became a basketball player because someone told him to. He's in a gang even though he doesn't support their violence.

In order to fit in, Gunnar had to learn to keep his head low for a while until he learned the rules, like no crying in public. His friendship with Scoby and his affiliation with the Gun Totin' Hooligans boosts his image a bit and even though he's not cool, he's "acceptable". People still notice that he's weird sometimes, because he doesn't dance or likes to read poetry, but he doesn't get in the way. He's not "funky" but he doesn't "disrupt the groove".

I think that this lack of agency is what is going to land him where he is the the prologue of the novel -- a radical leader without any real intention of being one. His awkwardness and his habit of just going with the flow is going to lead him to suggest that there is no solution to racism, everyone should just kill themselves. Right now the book is too happy. I'm scared of what awaits Gunnar.