Angry Black White Boy Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Praise

  Prologue: - Letter from a Birmingham Bus

  BOOK I - TRADER

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  BOOK II - TRAITOR

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  BOOK III - RACE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Adam Mansbach

  Copyright Page

  for my grandfather, Benjamin Kaplan,

  and in memory of Elvin Ray Jones

  Praise for ANGRY BLACK WHITE BOY

  “Angry Black White Boy gives new meaning to the term black humor. A singularly jittery blend of urban wit and southern Gothic, it’s a book of buoyant rhythm and dark material. A novel of ideas above all. . . . The book covers expansive intellectual and geographical terrain, [and] its drive never falters. Mansbach gets us there by creating a tense world whose figures often are at cross-purposes. Angry Black White Boy, like the truest expressions of hip-hop, graffiti, and jazz, is daring and original. It stings like its hero, Macon Detornay, a self-described scorpion of race.”

  —Boston Globe

  “A remarkably successful remix of the traditional race novel. Mansbach monkey-wrenches the formula of the angry black man in the white man’s world and incisively cuts to the heart of the issue of race in America today. [ Angry Black White Boy] shows us where we as a culture have come from, the distance we have traveled, and how long the road ahead remains. It is first-rate satire grounded in the absurd notion that a simple ‘I’m sorry’ can start to make things better. The novel will make you laugh, cringe, and read until the last page without knowing how it’s going to end. It is difficult to imagine a more appropriate conclusion for the story of Macon Detornay, as the uncertainty of fiction dovetails with the uncertainty of reality.” — San Francisco Chronicle

  “Mansbach is an able satirist of race issues . . . captures vividly the inhuman sadism inherent to racial violence.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “Angry Black White Boy unflinchingly delves into American racism. While Mansbach unfurls urban vernacular like a silver-tongued hip-hopper grasping a microphone, he chronicles Detornay’s media-injected ascension and horrific collapse with cinematic vision.”

  —Washington Post Express

  “A slash and burn novel of race relations in post hip-hop America. Sure to be dissected, reviled, misunderstood, and praised for years to come, which is exactly why you should read it now.”

  —XLR8R Magazine

  “A hilarious, terrifying, and brutally honest novel about race and American identity. Satire at its finest, it should be required reading for anyone interested in the microscopically thin line between love and hate that defines race relations in America.”

  —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  “Painfully hilarious . . . brilliant . . . leaves readers searching for answers amid the absurdity . . . not for the fainthearted.”

  —Time Out New York

  “Adam Mansbach has written what will possibly become the quintessential twenty-first-century race novel, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that the protagonist is white. A searing and dark tale of appropriated identity and racial stirring, Angry Black White Boy maintains a hilariously dark tone throughout.”

  —Undercover (UK)

  “A bold and layered examination of race in America.”

  —Minneapolis City Pages

  “Is a fresh take on race in America possible? In his breakout novel, Mansbach definitively answers: Hell yeah! A lyrical and ass-kicking romp.” — Portland Mercury

  “An engaging, cleverly worded tale that finally gives us something more than the rhetoric-filled fluff being touted as ‘hip-hop literature.’ An addictively good read comes in the form of Angry Black White Boy—cop it.” —Mugshot Magazine

  “Boldly confronts the issue of race while brilliantly blending hip hop, jazz, poetry, street culture, New York, mid-America, and even baseball to create a highly intense, moving, and original master-piece.” — Straight No Chaser (UK)

  “Subversive genius . . . a ferocious punt to the backside that leaves a Timberland print on your consciousness.” —East Bay Express

  “Satirical and often funny. . . . Forget white guilt—Angry Black White Boy is full-on white implosion.” —Time Out Chicago

  “A novel of high-minded absurdity . . . a smart, merciless story of cultural appropriation, racial justice, and individual authenticity.”

  —Creative Loafing Atlanta

  “Hard-hitting. Not since Spike Lee’s Bamboozled has America seen as trenchant and unapologetic a satire as Angry Black White Boy.”

  —AlterNet

  “This dude knows shit, and if you don’t . . . this read will send you well on your way. It’s over three hundred pages of comedy (dark), insight (powerful), and depth (deep).” —Newcity Chicago

  “Adam Mansbach’s novel is at once humorous and tragic as it delves into the complex issues of racial politics. Angry Black White Boy should certainly provide a unique and welcome addition to anyone’s bookshelves and as such is certainly worth picking up; however, putting it down may be somewhat more problematic.”

  —Grind Mode (UK)

  “A collar-grabbing satire.” —New York Metro

  “An amazing take on racial issues in the U.S. Beautifully told, the story grips you from the start . . . a race novel reworked for the hip-hop generation. It’s frank, to the point, and honest, and on top of that it’s one hell of a funny read, one you’ll find yourself going back to over and over.” —UK Hip-Hop

  “Seamlessly accurate, biting satire. . . . By the time Macon arrives at the cataclysmic riot that is the climax of the book, we know why he’s there, we can see what’s coming—and, as with the best horror films, we stick around to watch as the catastrophy hits.”

  —San Francisco Bay Guardian

  “Satire of the highest caliber, serious issues grounded in circumstances that at times are laugh-out-loud funny. With the same touch of humanism employed by writers such as James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, Mansbach does for the issue of race in contemporary America what those two did for it as the Civil Rights Movement came to the forefront of American discourse.”

  —Redsnap Magazine

  “Angry Black White Boy joins Chapelle’s Show in filling the void [by] addressing race issues in a direct and satirical fashion. Mansbach cleverly delivers . . . with dynamic language and vivid, funny characters.” — The Beat

  “An exercise in race consciousness that scours the clichés of white people’s awareness of racial privilege.”

  —San Francisco Weekly

  “An engrossing story . . . never falters in its boffo momentum. Its hilarity is studied and each fantastic flight gets a counter-punch.”

  — Bookslut.com

  “At turns hilarious and profoundly troubling, the novel serves as a meditation on hip-hop culture and its enormous influence on the psyches of white suburban youth.”
—Dose Magazine (Canada)

  “A heady, significance-laden rumination on race relations in America.” —Wired Magazine (UK)

  “A literary gem and an insightful lens on the never-ending conundrum surrounding white youth’s fascination with black culture and black people. Mansbach explores these desires, conflicts, and contradictions with extraordinary passion, poetry, pain, self-critical awareness, humor, and complexity. Angry Black White Boy is a gripping story that will stay on your mind for a long time.”

  —Tricia Rose, author of Black Noise: Rap Music and

  Black Culture in Contemporary America

  Prologue:

  Letter from a Birmingham Bus

  I’m here to tell the white man in the mirror the truth right to his face. I have seen the enemy and he is me. No competition, I battle myself. I’m Macon Everett Detornay, a white nigger in the universe, to paraphrase both LeRoi Jones—whose middle name I share, or did before he changed his—and the Aryan Nation vis-àvis yours truly, with whom I share nothing but low melanin and politics unacceptable to mainstream America. Or so I thought.

  Like Malcolm, I expect to be dead before I see these words in print. Naw, let me stop bullshitting. That’s a lie. I’m broadcasting live and direct from the getaway ride as the scene of the crime fades away into the speckled past and credits roll. I’d like to send this next one out to myself, special dedication to the one I love to hate, and I wanna give a big shout-out to the universe and New York City for believing in me when I’d stopped believing in myself. This award is for the little people. I wanna thank everybody who made me as bad as I could be, who boosted me until my noggin thumped against the glass ceiling of white people’s ability to give a fuck. I bled halfway to death trying to break on through and never made it, but guess what: I don’t give a fuck. I did my time, and now I know what I am.

  And knowing is half the battle. What is it the scorpion says to the frog as they both sink? I told you I was a scorpion, asshole. Except that white folks aren’t drowning and black folks never agreed to give us a lift across the pond in the first place. Maybe on some spiritual Thurgood Marshall this-system-hurts-us-all level we’re drowning, but most of us don’t seem to have noticed. And luckily, we can afford the best in psychiatric care, antidepressants, and religion should we begin to feel the water lapping at our ankles.

  So I’m a scorpion. Let me come to terms with it and get my scuttle down, cuz I done wasted years already trying to flap my nonexistent wings. Let me ease on back into the seat of privilege and lap the luxury out of some more complimentary drinks. Let me guzzle six hundred and sixty-six mind erasers and stop trying to be the exception to the rule, the face that wasn’t in jailbird Malcolm’s memory banks when the wise old Muslim inmate asked him if a white person had ever treated him right. Shit, if that face had existed, maybe Malcolm never would have. One good white person might have finished him before he started, and then where would we be? I’m glad it wasn’t me. I couldn’t live with that.

  Funny how easy it all falls away, how natural that scuttle feels despite all the time and energy I’ve spent fighting it with spray cans and microphones and brothers in arms, not to mention the guns around which my recent battles have revolved. And all for nothing: all to realize with one hundred percent of my brain that I’m the same as everyone I’ve ever hated, and that it only took them ten percent to know who they were from the get-go, and they been getting shitfaced on free drinks and laughter this whole time, watching me chase my shadow.

  They called me “The New Face of Hate” in Newsweek. The Nation asked, “Can America Take Macon Detornay Seriously?,” with a cutesy subheadline that read, “Can Macon Detornay?” The New York Post, with customary good taste and restraint, screamed “Ivy League Race Traitor” and called me “the city’s most controversial criminal since Bernhard Goetz.” Against my better judgment, I even posed for the cover of The Village Voice as “The New Black Leader?” I was hoping someone would call me the white Bigger Thomas, but nobody had the nutsack even though it’s an obvious comparison, what with Bigger being a chauffeur and me a cabbie. I talked a lot more shit than Bigger ever did, though. And I did what I did on purpose. And I got away.

  The big question, I guess, is how I got here. Not just on this bus stirring up dust across the Bible Belt, but on this vibe. How I became who I am, or was—the poster boy for an imaginary 1950s propaganda film entitled Nigra Madness, the bone-chilling story of how a nice kid from the suburbs got so black and twisted, revolutionary, niggerfied, that he renounced his race and became ONE OF THEM!

  It’s an impossible question. How did you become who you are? I’ve scrolled back through my memory as far as it will go, looking for some embryonic moment of divergence, some split from the growth pattern of my genotype, but I can’t find one. It would be nice if there was some simple answer, some creation myth—when I was ten I watched Eyes on the Prize twelve hours a day for seventeen straight weeks and I been pro-black ever since, or I ate a special soup made from Eldridge Cleaver’s boiled hypothalamus and presto change-o, or in a secret drum ceremony in Ghana I learned to channel the spirits of the tribal elders, or my daddy was a trumpet player who toured the Southern chitlin’ circuit back in ’63 and passed for an albino brother— but there’s not. My parents are standard-issue white liberals, just as puzzled as anybody. And like I said in damn near every one of those interviews, as far as I’m concerned, the question is not how I got this way, but how the rest of y’all didn’t.

  BOOK I

  TRADER

  I was the only player to take advantage of the grandfather clause written into the International League’s new rule. All the other colored players slung their bats over their shoulders and walked on April 29, 1889, the day the commissioner announced that the motion to segregate the league had passed. Negroes under contract could serve out the remainder of the season with their teams, but the boys knew what those final months would be like, especially in the Southern cities. The grandfather clause was sarcasm, a final insult. They walked out of pride.

  Out of pride, I stayed with the New York Giants. I was thirty-three years old and nobody was going to run me out of my chosen profession one second earlier than law allowed.

  The man most responsible for the new rule, or at least the man claiming the most credit, was Adrian Constantine “Cap” Anson, Chicago’s first baseman and manager, the greatest hitter the game had ever known. Anson had been pushing segregated play for years, some said since the day his club had lost the season to the Senators and Washington’s great colored pitcher, Left Hand Baker, had fanned him in five straight at-bats.

  Anson had done more for the game’s popularity than any man, and when he talked people listened, even the owners. Cap Anson sandlot teams dotted the country. On billboards along every league ballpark’s outfield walls, Cap Anson endorsed tooth powders and health tonics. When Anson came to town the gate receipts went up, the bleachers filled. And when he asked why niggers were allowed to play with white men and dirty up the Great American Pastime with their cheating and their coon balls, people wondered themselves.

  Niggers, Anson told the owners, didn’t understand a lick of strategy. They brought nigger fans into the ballparks, encouraged them to enter white neighborhoods and socialize with white folks. The excitement of the game was too much for nigger fans to handle; they got riled up and then they went out causing trouble. Athletically, niggers’ big thighs and clumsiness prevented them from being good fielders. And did the league really want to risk what might happen if a nigger player lost his temper, as the race was notorious for doing, and in a fit of rage turned on a white opponent with a bat? Integrated play was a disaster waiting to happen, Anson told the owners, and the owners put it to a vote and found that they agreed. Baseball was a game of dignity and poise, a white man’s game.

  And thus on April 29, 1889, I was not just the only colored in a uniform, but the only colored in the entirety of Atlanta, Georgia’s Robert E. Lee Stadium for the exhibition matinee betw
een the New York Giants and Cap Anson’s Chicago White Stockings. There was still a small fenced-off section of decaying bleachers marked For Coloreds Only, but it stayed empty as the stadium filled up. Colored fans, like colored players, had walked away from the game. I wondered what they thought of me for staying. I wasn’t out to be a hero, but until I looked up and saw the colored section empty, a barren, blighted patch amidst the fertile farmland, it hadn’t occurred to me that folks might have thought I was selling out by staying where I wasn’t wanted.

  The game began at two, so at one-thirty I took to the outfield with Red Donner, our first baseman, to warm up my arm. Red and I stood thirty feet apart and had a catch, Red tossing me slow grounders and me throwing back to Red on a line while he stood with his foot edging the imaginary first-base bag. I bent at the knees before the first roller, sprang to my toes, pivoted, threw, and watched the ball sail over Red’s left shoulder, six inches from his outstretched glove.

  “Say, Red, what’s the matter? You lose it in the sun?”

  Red gaped past me. “Behind you.”

  I turned. Filing into the box seats behind third base was a procession of some fifty costumed Klansmen, the white of their hoods shockingly bright in the sunlight. They moved loosely, just another day at the ballpark, glanced at their ticket stubs and found their seats and hunched with elbows on their knees and chatted.

  They’re going to kill me, was my first thought. I turned away, not wanting them to know I’d seen them, looked around the park and watched as fans poured in. I scanned the crowd for signs of shock, for some acknowledgment that there was a costumed militiapresent, but folks seemed no different than ever. How many of the uncostumed were any less willing to watch me die? Who would lift a finger, raise a voice in protest if the Klan rushed the field and a swarm of white fabric billowed up around me like a curtain in the breeze, folding me into itself until I disappeared?

  I sprinted to the dugout looking straight ahead. A cheer like rifle fire rose up from behind the third-base line as I passed the delegation, passed where I would stand with my back to the enemy for nine innings, twenty-seven outs, engaged in what seemed suddenly like both an impossibly foolish, infantile game and an undertaking as serious as anything in life could ever be.