A Continuation of the Reasons Behind Gunner's Depression

                This post is kind of adding onto and in a way answering my last post where I questioned if we would see how Gunner becomes the pessimistic person shown in the prologue. What I realized especially from the last couple pages of this book is that we did see this change, and that a lot of it had to do with the racism that Gunner thinks he can change but is actually unavoidable, which I talked about also in my last post. More specifically, in this post I wanted to briefly analyze how Gunner got to this point in his life where he was so depressed because of the racist systematic depression in the nation.

                Throughout The White Boy Shuffle I noticed that before Gunner got into this deep of a depression and crash he had a sense of hope that drove him. This sense of hope was the changing of the inequalities that African Americans faced, especially in L.A. Gunner early on in his life had a great sense of the inequalities that African Americans faced because of the fact that he had lived both in the hood and in wealthier white neighborhoods and gone to school there as a black student. Throughout his adolescent and teenage life, he realized this, but more importantly felt the need to do something about it and change the way things are. This resulted in Gunner picking up Poetry and writing a little about life in L.A as a black person. Then with the Rodney King beating, being the first to be caught on camera and spread nationwide, he had a larger drive for change. He said that he really hoped that the cops will be caught this time, and we can see his urge for change when him and Scoby really wanted to rob some stores and be part of the rebellious L.A riots.

But right afterwards he realizes that the robbery isn’t as exciting as he thought and it’s orderly and quiet, almost in a sense boring. This to me marks the change where Gunner is hit with this sense of hopelessness that grows to the character in the prologue, he thinks to himself “I never felt so worthless in my life”, and starts to feel like his poetry and all his work has done no change and is worthless. Even when he’s in the basketball camp it seems like his mind is somewhere else, because he hates listening to people talking about basketball and he rides horses in the middle of the day. When he visits Boston University, he notices that he’s actually a lot more popular than he thought, but once again becomes depressed because he found out that one of the main reasons he’s famous is because he’s a good black poet, his blackness having a lot to do with it. Therefore, he realizes that he hasn’t broken out of this racial barrier which he was working on destroying. Saying, “I felt like I had been outed and exposed by my worst enemies, white kids that were embarrassingly like myself but with whom I had nothing in common”. Basically meaning that they’re similar in that they both like writing and are intrigued by poetry, but they just don’t have the right mindset and are all part of this racist system which he feels like is surrounding him so much that he has to strip his clothes off to escape it, to which the students still grab his clothes and chase after him.

In the end it is this rise of hope and sudden fall after realizing that nothing really has changed which affected Gunner to the point of depression. Gunner eventually thinks about suicide which is his form of not letting whites take advantage of him anymore. In all Beatty does a great job in the representation of black life in L.A and what makes this book so important is that it’s something we are still seeing today with the black lives matter movement where blacks like Gunner Kaufman are worried about the mistreatment of their race.

Can Color Be Avoided?

                Already in the first two chapters in The White Boy Shuffle, Beatty dives in and indirectly questions the universal problem asking if it is possible not to judge somebody based off of the color of their skin. Beatty uses the character of Ms. Cegeny—the main character’s third grade teacher--, and shows how she always pounds into the heads of kids should be judged for their “minds” and not their “color”. But through this process Beatty hints at how it is almost impossible in modern America to do so.

                The method which Beatty uses to show how racism is something hard to avoid, is by relating it to something that has embedded itself in the world, such as nature, human eyesight, and mental capabilities. For example, when Melissa –one of the students—reads an article in the class about sunlight, I believe that Beatty purposely left in the part where Melissa says “Dark colors such as black absorb sunlight and light colors such as white reflect sunlight”. He does this to show that even something as necessary and common in daily life as sunlight is not colorblind, but treats blacks differently than whites. Later on in the day the main character goes to the doctor’s office to get examined, and asks the doctor “Our teacher says that we should be colorblind. That’s hard when you can see color, isn’t it?”. Here Beatty is making a metaphor to race, where even though the teacher is asking the students to be colorblind it’s almost impossible when humans can see the color on people’s skin, and sometimes it’s hard not to treat others differently based off of the history that is behind the color of their skin and the stereotypes which come with that.

                In The White Boy Shuffle Ms. Cegeny is a perfect example of the naïve white, patriotic, American who although is under good intentions to try and forget America’s racist past, thinks that it can be forgotten in an instant, in this case by telling 3^rd graders to do so. Like I said before, it is smart to try and change racism in America, but it cannot simply be told to children at a young age. Children should be informed of the racism in America first, so they can understand why it’s such a deep problem, and how much harder it is to change. In result they won’t just think of equality as something that is morally right like washing your hands, but something which is more of a sensitive issue, that might be solved in a couple centuries.

 In Beatty’s prologue, he takes on a pessimistic point of view and implies that it is such of a problem that it will never be solved. Beatty says, “In the quest for equality black folks have tried everything. We’ve begged, revolted, entertained, and intermarried and still are treated like shit. Nothing works, so why suffer the slow deaths of toxic addiction [] when the immediate gratification of suicide awaits [] our mass suicide will be the ultimate sit-in”. I wonder if similar to invisible man, this story will show a transformation illustrating how the main character changes from a fun-loving kid, being taught that everyone is equal regardless of their skin color, to the pessimistic man we see in the prologue who knows it is impossible to erase racism because he has experienced so much of it that it has become a permanent part of the world.