-
From Obama's Presidency to Beatty's Booker Prize: On the Notion of the "Racial Sellout"
- African American Review
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 54, Number 3, Fall 2021
- pp. 219-232
- 10.1353/afa.2021.0028
- Article
- Additional Information
Abstract:
This essay explores how Black Americans have deployed the notion of the racial sellout since the turn of the twenty-first century. First, it revisits Barack Obama's iconic presidency, examining how Obama and his critics each imagined the trap of "selling out." Next, it turns to Paul Beatty's Booker Prize-winning novel, The Sellout, which interrogates the supposedly postracial America that Obama left behind. Through its ironic performance of segregation, Beatty's novel exposes the real sellouts in contemporary America: those public leaders who defend "colorblind" discourse while refusing to recognize the nation's enduring racial inequities.