The Sellout

Paul Beatty is the author of the 2015 novel The Sellout—a satire that makes fun of contemporary norms around race and identity. In the novel, Beatty applies his no-holds-barred idea of comedy to segregation, slavery, police brutality, and countless tragic and fraught issues that people typically treat with extreme seriousness and sensitivity. Through the main character, Me, the book provides an ironic and unexpected take on themes like Racial and Personal Identity and Capitalism’s Power to Co-opt Activism. The Sellout is the first American book to win England’s prestigious Booker Prize, and it also won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

This guide refers to the 2015 Farrar, Straus and Giroux e-book version of The Sellout.

Content Warning: The Sellout contains offensive language around race, gender, sexuality, and trauma. The study guide reproduces this language in direct quotes and obscures Beatty’s frequent use of the n-word. The book also contains gun violence, including the killing of a Black man by police, and this guide discusses the historical precedent for that act.

Plot Summary

Me is in Washington, DC, where he’s about to go in front of the Supreme Court. He checks out the sights, including the zoo, where there’s a gorilla named Baraka—after the radical Black poet Amiri Baraka. He thinks about the motto outside the Court building, “Equal Justice Under Law,” and remembers believing, as a young person, that a clever slogan might solve the problems of Black America. As an adult, he thinks otherwise.

As Me is already on trial for attempting to restore slavery and segregation to his Southern California town, he figures he can get away with smoking marijuana in the building, so he gets high. A Black woman in the courtroom tries to make him feel the guilt of having betrayed his race, and the lone Black Supreme Court justice, who’s usually silent, yells at him, but Me doesn’t feel guilty, nor does he feel connected to his race.

Me’s dad, F. K., is the interim dean at a community college in Los Angeles. He and Me live on a farm in the low-income, predominantly Black California town of Dickens. F. K. is a sociologist who subjected Me to cruel experiments as a child to teach him about race and give him a firm sense of racial pride. The experiments failed, and after Me opted to play with the white Barbie and Ken over the Black activist dolls, F. K. burned his notes.

F. K. serves the Dickens community as the official N***** Whisperer. In other words, he helps people in distress. He’s also the founder of the local think tank, the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals, and his rival is Foy Cheshire—a TV personality and prolific author who stole F. K’s idea for a cartoon show.

One day, stuck behind two cops talking to a homeless woman, F. K. drives around them and then yells at them. The cops shoot and kill F. K., but Me doesn’t believe he’s dead—it’s a trick to teach him another lesson about race. F. K. is really dead, but Me doesn’t exploit the tragedy, and he doesn’t let the intellectuals use it for attention. Me buries his father in the back of the farm and uses the wrongful death settlement money to help F. K. posthumously achieve his dream of owning the farm.

Due to gentrification, Dickens disappears. The physical space is still there, but the signs go away. Without Dickens and his dad, Me feels lost. Hominy Jenkins, a former member of the Little Rascals—the mischievous young people at the center of the 20th-century Our Gang shorts—feels lost too. People used to come to Dickens to visit him. With Dickens gone, his fans can’t find him. After Me disrupts Hominy’s suicide attempt (a self-lynching), Hominy declares himself Me’s slave. Hominy works little, and Me pays a dominatrix to beat him.

To help Hominy and himself, Me decides to bring back Dickens. He creates a sign and redraws some of the boundaries. Me’s childhood sweetheart, Marpessa Delissa Dawson, now drives a bus, and Me is still in love with her, and Marpessa, though married with kids, likes him back. For Hominy’s birthday, she lets Me turn the public transit bus into a party bus and put up a segregation sign. The racist sign turns the rambunctious bus into a polite and secure place. Charisma Molina, the assistant principal at the local middle school, says students feel so safe on the bus that they do their homework there. Maybe if Me segregated the middle school, he could improve it.

As the middle school is already de facto segregated (there are no white children enrolled), Me constructs a fake white school across the street. Soon, the children excel, and the middle school is on its way to a top-five ranking. A group of white kids try to enroll at the school, and Foy, whose career and life are in shambles, takes up their cause. As conflict brews outside the school, Foy’s behavior grows increasingly grandiose. He turns the iconic Civil Rights marching song “We Shall Overcome” into “I Shall Overcome,” dumps white paint on his head, and shoots Me in the stomach, confessing his actions to a police officer and the medics.

Me’s lawyer, the flamboyant Hampton Fiske, gets Me’s case to the Supreme Court, and Fisk, using F. K.’s theory on Quintessential Blackness, tries to explain what it means to be Black. Me adds to his dad’s theory. Me’s conception of Blackness is a messy, malleable contradiction that can include people without Black skin, like the Japanese baseball player Ichiro Suzuki and the Icelandic singer Bjork.

Back home in Dickens, Hominy finally gets to see the suppressed, ultra-racist Our Gang shorts. Me has been trying to get them from Foy, and he acquires them in the civil suit related to Foy’s shooting (temporary insanity got him out of a manslaughter charge). The characters discover that Foy was also in some of the shorts. Later, the weather on the TV lists the forecast for Dickens—it’s as if Dickens is officially back.