The White Boy Shuffle

"The White Boy Shuffle" is the 1996 first novel of poet Paul Beatty. [Citation
last=Beatty
first=Paul
|authorlink=Paul Beatty
title=The White Boy Shuffle
publisher=Houghton Mifflin
year=1996
isbn=0395742803
url=http://books.google.com/books?id=V1BaAAAAMAAJ] 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 spectra of American life with a reckless zeal and zaniness rarely found outside of stand-up comedy.

It has been suggested by Mark Anthony Neal 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". [Citation
last=Neal
first=Mark A.
title=Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic
publisher=Routledge
year=2002
isbn=0415926580
url=http://books.google.com/books?id=sK5OTH1gRKAC
pages=134-135]

References