Maybe he felt like his coach was calling his blackness into question as well. Bryant would later say that he enjoyed reading it, though he didn’t appreciate Jackson’s assumptions about his life. Phil Jackson, back when he was coaching the Los Angeles Lakers, gave Kobe Bryant a copy of Beatty’s book, ostensibly because Kaufman’s fish-out-of-water upbringing reminded Jackson of Bryant’s childhood in Italy. It does not end well: he inspires a movement of disaffected black youth to martyr themselves. his mother moves the family from their affluent, white suburb back to “the ghetto.” In the course of the novel, Gunnar, a sensitive young poet and reluctant basketball player, eventually becomes his generation’s messiah. As a literary archetype, everything about Gunnar feels off, from his beach-bum persona to the way his family runs counter to traditional uplifting narratives of the American Dream: his father works as a sketch artist for the racist L.A.P.D. It tracked the life and times of young Gunnar Kaufman, a “funny, cool, black guy” hailing from a long line of “spineless,” far-from-righteous African-Americans: deserters, cowards, a freedman who wandered back into slavery, a great-great-uncle who painted the “ COLORED ONLY” signs ubiquitous during Jim Crow. So it was a landmark event when, in 1996, Paul Beatty published “The White Boy Shuffle,” a satirical exploration of racial identity’s seeming elasticity. That Ellis felt compelled to issue such a hopeful yet fundamentally basic call speaks to the sad entanglements of American racial politics at the time, and the ways in which representational spaces for African-Americans continued to winnow. The signs were all around us: the knotty, urbane films of Spike Lee the punkish bravado of Fishbone all the artsy, middle-class kids exploring identities that weren’t beholden to readymade signifiers like “Africa and jazz.” This would be a generation of “cultural mulattos,” postmodern children of the multicultural age who were comfortable in a variety of settings, a kind of hopeful, flexible, and self-empowered embodiment of W.

Ellis believed that the coming decade demanded a new, eclectic approach to African-American cultural expression, one that would reckon with the full continuum of the black experience, from the city to the suburbs.

In 1989, the writer and filmmaker Trey Ellis published a concise, manifesto-like essay titled “The New Black Aesthetic.” His argument was fairly straightforward and, in retrospect, perhaps its significance was the fact that he had to write it at all.

Paul beatty's the sellout