The White Boy Shuffle
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The White Boy Shuffle is the 1996 first novel of poet Paul Beatty. It was met with enormous and near universal critical acclaim, but failed to gain a large audience. It is occasionally used in social psychology to teach about perspective and the interactions of groups in the US. It is a very blunt book which tackles issues across all spectrums of American life with a reckless zeal and zaniness rarely found outside of stand-up comedy.
It has been suggested by Mark Anthony Neal1 that Paul Beatty's protagonist, Gunnar Kaufman, is "a reference to the Swedish ethnographer Gunnar Myrdal, who chronicled black life in An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy".
1 Neal, Mark A. Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic. New York: Routledge, 2002. 134-135.