Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, released in 2015, has already secured its place as a significant book. The novel follows a young man, identified only as “The Sellout” or “Me,” as he attempts to reintroduce slavery and segregation in modern America. Beatty’s satire vividly describes the racist history of the United States with biting laughter and sorrow mixed into each sentence. The Sellout won the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and is currently shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, one of the world’s most prestigious awards for English language novels.

Dr. Grady Ballenger, a professor with the English department, assigned The Sellout last spring for his course “The Comic Impulse in the Novel and Film.” Amanda Roger, a junior communications major, wrote the following essay after reading the novel. It is reprinted with her permission as an insertion into the discussion about who can say what across America and the enduring power of words with long, ugly histories. All of her quotations come from The Sellout, with one notable exception.

As I sit to write this piece, I am caught by the humor in what I am about to do. I am writing a review of a book whose main point is that we are all too sensitive to talk about what is right under our noses. So we use euphemisms and platitudes, but when push comes to shove, it’s the Freudian “some of my best friends are monkeys” kind of slips that reveal what hides beneath the politeness.

In this piece, I want to talk about weed, watermelon, and the use of the n-word. At least one of these is a very sensitive topic, so we could consider this piece a social experiment in the vein of the wonderful founder of “Liberation Psychology”. If a 26-year-old Caucasian woman from the Midwest, a young adult who grew up with her dad in a small Missouri town during the weeks and in her mom’s trailer park on the weekends, reads a book that says the n-word, and she must quote that book in an essay to be read aloud in front of a mixed audience. What is she supposed to do when she comes to it? Does she say the offensive word, making everyone grimace and shift in their seats, or does she castrate it with a hyphen, thereby enacting the ridiculous kind of censorship the author berates?

What is hysterical to me about Me’s character is that he effortlessly finds himself deep within all of the stereotypes of black Americans. He exemplifies them. He doesn’t just like watermelon; he grows it in a variety of shapes and sizes. He doesn’t just smoke weed, he has created his own mega strains that have psychedelic healing properties- the kind of high class high that suits even the Supreme Court. He is offensive just by his actuality. There is no way to describe him in a politically correct way because his existence plays directly into America’s racial assumptions. He superficially fits the stereotype, but he does not engage in derisive aspects of the stereotype, which forces us to question its validity.

Beatty uses metaphor literally. “Hominy simply pulled down his pants, shit on my geraniums, and wiped his ass with his freedom, then handed it back to me.” A person pooping on their own freedom has a metaphoric ring to it, but it actually happens in the book. This blending of physical metaphor, stereotype, and commentary creates a melting of reality. It is almost a haze in which the reader feels safe to engage with these racial issues. But outside of the hazy, weed fueled rhetoric of the narrator, a sharp reality emerges. This penetration of the haze into reality is partially a function of trying to decide how, exactly, I am supposed to read a specific six letter word out loud.

In the novel, Me and Hominy run into a variation of this issue when they need someone to beat Hominy and yell racial slurs. The first five slurs were free, and it was three dollars a pop after that. Except for this word, this was ten dollars, “in any of its varied forms, derivations, and pronunciations.” The book also introduces a particularly fascinating censorship technique in which Foy Cheshire rewrites Huckleberry Finn. “Where the repugnant ‘n-word’ occurs, I replaced it with ‘warrior’ and the word ‘slave’ with ‘dark-skinned volunteer.’” This rewrite would give us such quotable gems as, “I liked the warrior for that; I tell you, gentlemen, a warrior like that is worth a thousand dollars—and kind treatment, too” (this is particularly poignant when you consider that Ms. Watson was going to sell the ‘warrior’ for only eight hundred dollars). These edits will also force Huck to try and “steal Jim out of dark-skinned volunteerdom.”

Beatty, through the narrator, gives his take on it. “…why blame Mark Twain because you don’t have the patience and courage to explain to your children that the ‘n-word’ exists…No one will ever refer to them as “little black euphemisms,” so welcome to the American lexicon– .” What is funny about the American lexicon in this context is that it’s use is stratified along colored lines. For example: I did not finish the above quote because I am still not sure I am allowed to speak the word that comes next. This puts us squarely back into the present moment where your politically correct white classmate tries to analyze the use of a word as she dances around actually using it. The comedy in the book parallels the humor of the current situation. I was raised to believe that a certain word is unspeakable, no matter what the circumstances. I am now in a unique situation where saying it or not saying it has nearly the same racial impact. I don’t want to be like one of the several white people who end up crying over the realization of their own latent racial thoughts. Beatty has put me in a situation to laugh at how very unnecessary my discomfort is, and how empty a law is when following its letter only enables us to ignore the violation of its spirit. So, without further ado, I will now read my favorite line from the book:

In my head. Of course.