Satire Podcast #1

The podcast discusses two texts: "The Sellout" by Paul Beatty and "Black No More" by George Schuyler. "The Sellout" portrays a black man on trial for reinstituting slavery and segregation in his community to address inequality. The narrator feels no guilt, while others are outraged. "Black No More" explores a movement to bleach African Americans' complexions to fit into white society. The narrator becomes white but realizes the importance of black community and authenticity. Both texts satirize race in America, highlighting contemporary and traditional issues. They show that cultural norms and power dynamics fail to solve inequality. American satire uses vivid storytelling and irony to engage and change perspectives on race and equality. Hello, and welcome to today's episode of our Engaging Aesthetics podcast. Today, we'll be discussing two texts, Paul Beatty's The Sellout and George Schuyler's Black No More. And I'm Ben Marinsky. My name is Randy Minerva. And I'm Ruby Garrison. So, in The Sellout, we're sort of thrust into a courtroom, and we follow the narrator's inner dialogue. He's on trial because he reinstituted slavery and segregation as a black man in his Los Angeles community. And he sort of did it to remedy inequality and a lack of community unity. The narrator feels no guilt. He feels he should do no wrong as a black person, and his lack of guilt is sort of juxtaposed against two external black characters in the courtroom who are just absolutely outraged and cannot even comprehend what he's done. So first, we see this lady in the courtroom who sort of has an outburst against him. And then later, the black judge sort of also has an outburst. And he says, you know, he's totally betrayed his race in doing this and that he should be hung immediately. So this is sort of more contemporary commentary on, you know, present racial issues in America. And then, which is different from George Schuyler's Black No More, which is a more traditional commentary on racism and, you know, at its height in the 1920s and the 1930s, we follow this movement to bleach African Americans' complexion to fit into white society. The narrator, Max Fisher, undergoes this treatment, and he becomes ultra-white, and he uses his new whiteness and the power and equality and respect associated with it so he can pursue a white lady in Georgia. That's sort of the reason he does it in the first place. But he quickly finds himself missing, you know, a sense of black community and authenticity, and he finds himself back in Harlem with his friends. And then much later in the story, we follow Snobcraft and Budgery, who are leaders of the Anglo-Saxon Association, basically a parody of the Ku Klux Klan, I guess, the equivalent at the time. And they, you know, get in a plane crash and find themselves in Mississippi, and we see this belief that ultra-whiteness is actually associated with being black, so it's not really an obsession with color, it's actually with lineage, so whether or not you're related to black individuals, which Snobcraft ironically is. And he is found not white enough by the Mississippi standards, and he and his associate are brutally lynched by the Reverend and his mob in Mississippi. So we have these two stories, one more contemporary and one more traditional, but both sort of satirizing race in America. Yeah. I think it's important to kind of look at these differences, especially within the story. So just what I noticed was kind of the structure of the story was very different. The sellout was more a one-on-one. It was an individual dialogue, is how I'd kind of describe it. And then for Black No More, we're looking at more of a general storyline from multiple perspectives, and we're kind of seeing the entire scope of the issue rather than one perspective. And I think a big key difference between these two stories is one is about submitting to cultural norms and the dangers of that, and another is about flipping the power dynamic of cultural norms and kind of how even when the power dynamic's flipped, there's still a societal problem that we can find. So in the sellout, we're looking at a situation where we're kind of falling back on these cultural norms, where we're looking at segregation and racism and these problems that we see with race relations in America, but we're looking at it from a black perspective instead of a white perspective, while in Black No More, we're looking at this completely new and seemingly absurd scenario where we're changing the race of a group that's been discriminated against in this completely ridiculous situation. And I also think it's kind of interesting to see that in the sellout, we're looking at a much more rambunctious and aggressive character who really seems to be more careless and not care about these societal norms. He's smoking weed in the courtroom. He's not following – I don't know if we introduced this, but it's in the Supreme Court, and he's very much not following what one would consider to be normal etiquette of the Supreme Court. He's doing his own thing. He doesn't really care for the structures of society, and he's very much acting off his inhibitions. And then in Black No More, we're kind of introduced to this story where Max, the narrator, he's out on New Year's Eve, and he finds this white woman who he finds completely, just utterly beautiful. He goes up to talk to her, and she completely tells him off. She has no interest in him. She's pretty much disgusted that he would even approach her. And instead of acting more like the sellout narrator and doing his own thing, he decides to fully change his race and chase this girl, kind of accepting this cultural norm that black men and white women are not to be together, and if he wants to chase this girl, he has to be white. Do you want to talk about vulgarity? Oh, sure. The language in the sound is, of course, more, I guess, vulgar, and it's used like expletives and cursing, while in Black No More, it's more descriptive vulgarity, like the lynching scene and everything. Very grotesque, right? Yeah. While Black No More goes full circle, while in the sellout, we're only introduced to the idea of vulgarity and stuff? Yeah. I would say in the sellout, they're speaking very directly to the audience about racial stereotypes, and they want to make it very vulgar and crude to make the audience uncomfortable and make them think about these racial issues. In Black No More, again, this doesn't sound great, but it's more traditionally grotesque in that lynching scene. It's very descriptive, and it's honestly just shocking what they do to them, but I think that they're both using vulgarity to really make the audience think about these important issues and sort of shock them into... Yeah. I think that's a great point. They both kind of elicit emotion from the reader, but it's very different kinds of emotion. One you tend to shy away from, and one is a little more commonplace and accepted. Speaking of differences, you also have to probably speak of the similarities in between the two works. Of course, both works focus on race and racism in America. However, in the sellout, it's more of a contemporary focus on racism, Obama-Trump era racism in America, while in Black No More, it's more of an early 20th century racism, 1920s, 30s, Ku Klux Klan, and that. In both stories, however, no resolution is reached. In the sellout, the protagonist's action of reintroducing segregation and slavery does not revitalize his talent, and so he has gone through this whole process to achieve nothing. In Black No More, the process of whitening doesn't solve the race issue. It just redevelops it into a different context. Blackness and whiteness is how light you are. In both works, it shows that society and culture cause the tension and destruction of racism. Yeah. I think that's another interesting point. This more commonplace and normal scenario and this more absurd scenario kind of gets to the nature of the satirical elements that these authors choose to use. Obviously, we're dealing with race relations, which is a really heavy topic a lot of the time, and I think what is kind of shown, not just about these stories, but about satire, about race in general, is sometimes you need to present – sometimes satire uses incredibly absurd situations to highlight the absurdity of the issue itself, and sometimes it uses very boring and plain situations to also highlight the absurdity of the situation. They're both different techniques that can be used in different scenarios. Yeah. I think another important part, just to go along with – obviously, they're both very absurd, but I think neither one reaches a resolution. In both cases, in the sellout, obviously, the judge just can't even comprehend what he's done as a portrayal of his race. Obviously, what he did didn't really help in terms of getting to a more equal society. Then in Black No More, at the end, we sort of see a return to a desire to tan or darken your skin because now they associate being ultra-white with actually being black. I think there's irony in both of those situations. First, in the sellout, it's, again, a portrayal of your own race being black and owning slaves or wanting to resegregate society, and then also the irony in Black No More, which, again, it's just basically saying racism isn't actually that your race or else people would be hyper-fixated on skin color, which in this case they are. It's actually more – going back to what Ben talked about, the power dynamics of an us-versus-them scenario, and just hints to the fact that humans need some sort of hierarchy to structure our society. Again, in both cases, both are very absurd, and they just show that neither one of these hierarchies or these scenarios actually work. They're just so absurd that they fail, and we need other means to remedy inequality, I guess. I think also both these texts show how American satire is structured. I think, especially within American culture, we do really well with – we respond to vivid storytelling a lot better and techniques like irony and stuff to keep us engaged. I think – I don't know. They both highlight different ways that American satire can present an issue. I agree with you talking about how we respond to things that are more vivid and absurd. Even if you look at the news today, and even these stories themselves, I think that for me personally, I remember the very absurd elements of them just because they're so vulgar and they're so satirical, and you're just – in your mind, you're like, wait, what? I think that's really important in terms of these stories making an impact and actually changing how we think about race and equality in America today, which is the ultimate goal of the authors. Yeah. All right. I think – Any last thoughts? I think we're good. I think we're all good, yeah. That was our episode. Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed it. Thank you.