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.