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.