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.
I think you did a good job of explicating the title, as the connection between shuffling (under the definition of changing location) and Gunnar's identity makes a lot of sense. It reflects the random nature of Gunnar's move and how his "whiteness" is an issue for him. In addition to that, the white boy shuffle as a dance suggests awkwardness, and that word accurately describes Gunnar's initial interactions in LA. However, I think Gunnar's reputation has grown to a celebrity status because of his basketball playing which doesn't fit the dynamic of your analogy, but because of his discomfort with that status and of being noticed in the club, he is still not "funky."
ReplyDeleteThe scene where Gunnar is trying to dance is a very important turning point, not in just the dropping of the title on pg 123, but in Gunnar's attempts to fit in with the culture of Hillside he is dropped into. Even though it is "white" and "not funky", it is "acceptable" which is all that matters.
ReplyDeleteYour prediction proved to be spot on. Gunnar really doesn't know how he ended up being a messiah, and doesn't know if he really likes being one. I think the title is extremely important in a book like this one because Gunnar's "whiteness" will always be somewhere within him as that's how he was raised. Yet, so much of him has been transformed by growing up in Hillside that perhaps all that outwardly remains is his "shuffle."
ReplyDeleteGunnar definitely doesn't seem to care about the role he ended up in , as a sort of "messiah" nor does he seem to care much about the roles he's filled along the way (basketball player, publishing the book, orator, etc.) and yet he has a strange confidence about him. I do think he knows and understands what he's doing, his ideas just manifest in disturbing ways. It's strange that he doesn't seem profoundly bothered by the various suicides that are committed and yet it's undeniable that he mourns the death of Scoby (though he didn't try to stop his suicide). Perhaps his cynical ideology and casual flippancy reflect a bit of existentialist philosophy in that he thinks the only "sit-in" that would make a difference is suicide, and therefore why should he care about the things in his life?
ReplyDeleteI thought your post was really interesting and this wasn't something I thought about before. It definitely makes sense to me because Gunnar never had a problem fitting in with the white kids, at the multi-cultural school he was the cool black kid and had friends and at El Campesino (sp?) he fit in pretty well.
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