Support for Suicide

In White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty, many people read the ending of the book as a bleak sign that Gunnar and the rest of the black community have given up and there's no hope for the future. They see suicide as the easy way out and look down upon Gunnar for not fighting racism and going down swinging.

This view is definitely understandable and as much as I disagree, I have trouble finding the words to contradict this view of suicide that's the norm in western culture. But as we talked about in class, a missed free throw isn’t hurting the player, it's hurting the crowd. And a dead baby born into slavery doesn't hurt the mother, it hurts the slaver. When people say “Oh he had so much to live for, so did that baby born a slave. Each had so much to offer the white man and so little to live for within themselves.

There will always be other boys who can play basketball and poets too. If Gunnar hadn't played with Scoby that one day would he still have something to live for? Would he be worth anything at all? If Psycho Loco, the gangbanging killer, had decided to die, is that important? Did he have something to live for? When the officers were acquitted on all charges for the Rodney King beating Gunnar says he feels worthless. That being a black person in America meant your life meant nothing. And I think that's what Beatty is trying to get across. He's a black boy who’s life without his standout skills is essentially meaningless to us and American does not love him enough to stop him.

Gunnar says to Psycho Loco that he just wants to win for once. But to him, winning isn't making the last free throw, it’s throwing the game.

Laughter or Love

Richard Wright’s critique of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is centered around the fact that Hurston’s characters and method of telling a story could be a continuation of minstrelsy. I understand that Wright sees the comedic dialogue between townspeople as something playing on stereotypes of southern black people just to entertain a white audience. Similarly, the concept of the happy field worker, which is seen in Hurston’s depiction of life in the Everglades, is a trope found often throughout the history of minstrel shows. For Wright to see her work through this lense makes sense, especially because as a protest writer, Wright was very concerned with his audience and their perception of his characters. However, I don’t think that this criticism is applicable to Their Eyes Were Watching God.


Hurston isn’t an author who is attempting to cater to a white audience in this novel. As a woman who grew up in the town she features in her novel and who studied the vernacular and oral traditions of people she writes about. Her story mimics the type of oral folktales that I myself grew up with. The type of comedic interactions in between people are very reminiscent of interactions between Brer Possum and Brer Rabbit, Little Eight John and his mother and many other people in stories that have been passed down. The comedy seems to me to be a tool to connect with what may be familiar to a lot of black readers and it seems that this is a work of familiarity and love rather than one of mocking.