There lives an idea that serious issues can only be made in jest. I’d first heard this notion posed by David Foster Wallace, who recognized the difficulty in being serious in a time where sincerity is equated to sentimentality, and where genuineness deserves mockery. We only have to consider how we receive the ‘overbearingly’ political, the ‘angry’ environmentalist or the ‘fervently’ religious to see this point in action.
And so, when we think about serious conversation in popular culture, its not to the philosophers and poets we reach, but often enough to the comedians. From Dave Chappelle to Aziz Ansari to Aparna Nancherla, not only do they make us laugh but they’ve strangely become our purveyors of truth.
In his book, Think Like A White Man, Nels Abbey has produced something akin to a Machiavellian guide to race relations, only using outrageous levels of satire to make his point. It’s a serious book which, for the life of you, you’ll be challenged to take seriously. Between the dry chuckles and laugh-out-loud moments, I found myself continually asking, ‘Is this guy serious?’
Nels writes under the fictional moniker of Dr Boulé Whytelaw III, an esteemed black professional who has seemingly performed all the necessary’s in order to beat the White Man at his own game. Now, having risen to the top, he wants you to do the same.
From the title alone the reader may be mistaken into thinking this book some kind of guide to coonism and buffonery (Dr Whytelaw outlines ‘187 Do’s and Don’ts’, including instructing the reader to speak white, dress proper and, essentially, shed any remnant of blackness possessed), only we soon catch on to the man behind the mask. That, for lack of a better term, there lies a real black man behind the façade.
As readers we are conscious that Dr Whytelaw’s words are to be taken in jest, yet it’s this very same consciousness which tells us he isn’t joking at all. In all its outrageous suggestion, the book tugs at the edges of reasonability to bring light to the unbelievable positions that black people often find themselves in.
All black professionals working in spaces dominated by white people have a degree of white in them because, in very real sense, they have to. What the book starkly highlights is the fact that black people, in their natural black selves, are completely intolerable to the institutions of white supremacy, and that to have any chance of survival let alone progression, this self must be suppressed.
And it’s here the joke ends. Because for those of us who have been through it, we are reminded that this is exactly what is required. Look around and consider the attributes of those ethnic minorities who rise to the top (or just simply have a professional role) within ‘white institutions’. Even myself. I’m under no illusion that without my capacity to speak, write and present myself in a way that ingratiates to white people I would not have the job I do, nor be able to coordinate in wholly white spaces in the way that I can.
And so, in realising this, Think Like A White Man can be read as an exposition into white supremacy. But not the structural, ephemeral version we’ve become comfortable discussing, but rather the grounded and relatable one. For me it’s one of the best examples I’ve read of white supremacy not being about individual white people (his categorisation of the different types of ‘white’ is reflective), yet at the very same time being precisely about white people, and the everyday behaviours that shape race relations in this country.
If a book can be charged with being too entertaining its because it stripes the prose of making its more considered nuances felt. Think Like A White Man doesn’t do this. It is indeed thoughtful enough for you to take seriously, even when in fits of laughter.
Margin Page.
Margins Page is a play on its very words. Stories of black people in Britain, both past and present, have often been relegated to the margins of the British canon. This platform attempts to reconfigure this position, serving as a page to help develop, curate and promote black British literature.
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