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Created: November 23, 2003
Latest Update: November 23, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

White Boy Shuffle and One Explanation of Racism in the Novel

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, November 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.

On November 18, 2300, Jessica A. Bulles wrote: How would you feel that Beatty defines racism? White Boy Shuffle and Answerability

I should think he would define it as alterity in which Person has made little or no attempt to understand or to listen in good faith to Other. For me, his book is about creating a voice for Other, sometimes belligerently, and aggressively, and with very little concern about Person, who has excluded Other in his case. It is as though he would like to create his own world right in the middle of the hostile alien world in which he finds himself, but he does choose to go on creating. The suicide of his father suggests that the father was still listening in good faith to Person and trying to conform to a system from which he was unjustly excluded. The hero can walk away because he listening to his own voice and not accepting the valuation and the exclusion of Person.

All this relates to answerability in that the hero doesn't know how to answer just because he has insisted upon his right as an Other to do so. He is experimenting and learning how to establlish answerability in a monologic non-answerable bureaucracy. Sometimes he succeeds, sometimes he fails, but he never accepts the judgment of Person - this is where he is different from his father. His answerability has achieved a level of awareness, but he still has much to work out to learn to effectively interact with Person as Other without the traditional violence and hostility.

Theory here bases on Greg Nielsen's and jeanne's interpretation of Bakhtin's answerability. jeanne