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White Boy Shuffle, Paul Beatty

Ð'* Beatty, Paul. White Boy Shuffle. New York: Picador, 1996.

"Ð'...I'd watch my father draw composite sketches for victimized citizens who used his face as reference point." (Beatty, 11)

""Ð'...approached a boy about my age who wore an immaculately pressed sparkling white T-shirt and khakis and was slowly pacing one slue-footed black croker-sack shoe in front of the otherÐ'..."Damn, cuz. You talk proper like a motherfucker."" (Beatty, 41)

"Ð'...we practice what we like to call Ð''preventative police enforcement.' Whereby, we prefer to deter habitual criminals before they cause irreparable damage to the citizenry and/or it property." (Beatty, 47)

"Watching his hands shake, I realized that sometimes the worst thing a nigger can do is perform well. Because then there is no turning back. We have no place to hideÐ'...Successful niggers can't go back home and blithely disappear into the local populance." (Beatty, 119)

"Ð'...[I] saw a store owner spray-paint BLACK OWNEDÐ'...I wanted to dig out my heart and her do the same to it, certifying my identity in big block lettersÐ'...I suddenly understood why my father wore his badge so proudly. The badge protected him." (Beatty, 131)

The Laramie Project

Ð'* "The Laramie Project." HBO Films. 2005. Home Box Office. 30 Nov. 2005 .

The Laramie Project is about a gay college student named Matthew Shepard, who on Onctober 6th, 1998, was brutally beaten, tied up and left for dead on a fence off a rural road... and when Laramie, Wyoming became the Hate Crime Capital of America. Five members of the theater company - Moises, Greg, Leigh, Steve and Amanda - have arrived there to research a play they are writing about how the Shepard assault has changed this town. The details of the case were clear-cut and well-known. On October 6, Matthew Shepard met two men at the Fireside Bar in Laramie. Eighteen hours later, a cyclist found Shepard unconscious, severely beaten and tied to a fence. He never regained consciousness, and died five days later. Two Laramie residents, aged 20 and 21, were apprehended for the crime, which became front-page news around the country. But as Moises explains as the company assembles at a local diner, "This is not about the case. This is about the town: why did this happen here, what are people saying, how do they feel and think about what happened." Through out the rest of the movie, the movie cast interviews different people to get their view of this crime to find out how they felt about it and why they think it happened. (The Laramie Project)

No matter how much we accept it or not, we live in a society filled with stereotypes. So what does it tell us? It tells us, that we are not fully liberated and that the movements that were supposed to make us stop discriminating against one another partially failed. Although, we did stop discriminating on some levels, we still tend to assign people to certain communities, based on race, gender and even sexual orientation, through stereotypical characteristics. For instance, one of the most common stereotypes used today is if you are black, then you know how to play basketball. All these stereotypes are carefully portrayed in Paul Beatty's work, White Boy Shuffle, and The Laramie Project. The authors do not necessarily choose to rebel against the stereotypes, but try to educate us about that fact that we need to stop "judging books by its cover" and learn to give up some of the stereotypes. You never know, but one of the people you stereotyped, could have been your best friend or even a life saver, if only you gave them a chance.

In nowadays probably the most stereotyped groups are blacks and homosexuals. We tend to assume a lot of things about a person based on just their appearance. If you are black, you probably get stereotyped the most. We generally tend to see black communities, as a place with "Ð'...no gentle slopes upon which children climb trees and overly friendly park rangersÐ'..." (Beatty, 45), in other words, that's a neighborhood full of crime filled with gangs and people on welfare. Paul Beatty in the White Boy Shuffle is trying to present to us these common misconceptions so we can see how ridiculous we really are. There might be some communities like that, but there could be other races living there too, not necessarily blacks. We learn from Beatty's work that we shouldn't just stereotype people just based on race. The face that Gunnar Kaufman didn't know how to dance, already defeats the stereotype that all black people can dance. To go even deeper to prove the fact that our minds are not liberated, Paul Beatty brings even more stereotypes and makes fun of them. For example, when Gunnar Kaufman moves into