This question is based on Paul Beatty's White Boy Shuffle, a postmodern novel, a Black coming of age novel, by a talented young novelist from Los Angeles. Read the following paragraph from White Boy Shuffle:

"What're a few n . . . jokes among friends? We Kaufmans have always been the type of n . . .rs who can take a joke. I used to visit my father, the sketch artist at the Wilshire LAPD precinct. His fellow officers would stand around cluttered desks breaking themselves up by telling how-many-n . . .s-does-it-take jokes, pounding each other on the back and looking over their broad shoulders to see if me and Daddy were laughing. Dad always was. the epaulets on his shoulders raising up like inchworms as he giggled. I never laughted until my father slapped me hard between the shoulder blades. The heavy-handed blow bringing my weight to my tiptoes, raising my chin from my chest, and I'd burp out a couple of titters of self-defilement."

• Labeling Theory and Ethnomethodology, Online.
  Good source of theory for understanding the passage from White Boy Shuffle

Click on the BACK button of your browser to return to the exercise.

1. How does the idea that dominant discourse affects loving fit into the above paragraph?

Choose "accurate" or "inaccurate" for each of the following interpretations.

1. Dominant discourse, the normative language and culture in which the values and expectations of the dominant group are expressed, constrain both the imaginary and the expression of alternative ideas, creativity, and feelings. The dominant group in the above paragraph is white. Gunnar and his father are constrained to defer to the pejorative jokes of the whites. This adversarial expectation makes it near impossible to approach the situation from a mutuality perspective. (Fellman)

   jeanne's lecture notes:

   Accurate. I'm a little taken aback by the "near impossible." That's colloquial language and this is an academic interpretation. What could we have used in place of the colloquialism? How about "this adversarial expectation intimidates by its unstated assumption that Gunnar and his father are respected members of the system, so that their intimation that they felt excluded would have seemed to contradict "reality" and make them "oversensitive" or "crazy."?

   Notice that in trying to word this more accurately, I moved to giving more detail. Often when we resort to colloquialisms we are avoiding the difficult task of thinking our interpretation through in detail.

2. The dominant discourse is expressed in pejorative epithets. The white police officers use the "n" word. We have been told since we were small children that one does not need to use offensive language if one commands a large and effective vocabulary. "Perjorative epithets are used by those with inadequate vocabularies," said our parents. Beatty's detailed description of the kind of stories the white officers were telling gives us a great deal more information about the exclusion of Gunnar and his father as Blacks. Beatty's description suggests that the officers were not calling Gunnar and his father pejorative names, but were implying the intellectual inferiority of all Blacks. The very fact that Beatty uses the large and effective vocabulary, while the whites with their derogatory jokes use pejoratives, tends to belie the dominant discourse, for the Black critique is more sophisticated and literate than the childish taunting of the fellow officers.

   jeanne's lecture notes:

   Accurate. this interpretation was meant to reflect the subtlety of Beatty's approach. By using the very literate style and vocabulary that make the white officers appear childish in their repetitious how-many-does-it-take jokes, Beatty contradicts the essence of what their jokes imply, that Blacks are of inferior intellectual quality. There is considerable irony in this brief passage.

3. The fact that the fellow officers looked to see if Beatty and his father were laughing seems to indicate that they were accepted in the group, and that if they had not laughed, the jokes might have stopped. However, since the officers were taking part in dominant discourse, there was no acceptable discourse in which Gunnar and his father could reach or express their feelings.

   jeanne's lecture notes:

   Accurate. The matter of exclusion is complex in the study of dominant discourse. The exclusion comes as much from the power of the normative, which makes the dominant discourse seem as if it describes what is inevitable, or the way things should and must be, as it does from actual refusal to include. That is why the last sentence in the interpretation says that neither Gunnar nor his father "could reach or express their feelings." One may have feelings subconsciously, but if such feelings are continuously denied by an adversarial system, it becomes increasingly hard to reach those feelings before they are suppressed in the name of survival in the adversarial system. Once reached, the further barrier is encountered when we find that we have only the dominant discourse to express the feelings, when the dominant discourse has already usurped the language of feeling, on the unwritten assumption that subalterns do not have feelings worthy of expression.

---

---