Black Buck

Askaripour emphasizes the novel’s race-related themes through a motif of contrasting the color white with black or brown. In the first half of the book, when Darren is acculturating to the white-dominated corporate mores at Sumwun, Askaripour depicts the whitening of Blackness. The most notable example is the whitening of Darren’s body. When Clyde dumps the bucket of white paint on him, he claims “I though the white would help you fit in better” (68), referring to the fact that Darren is the only Black person at Sumwun. After cleaning off the paint, Darren is given white clothes to change into, an additional symbol of an attempt to replace his Blackness with whiteness. Clyde’s “joke” highlights the racial difference between Darren and his colleagues and their selective attention to race in general. The everyday white supremacy on display in Clyde’s joke is exemplified by the figure of Bonnie Sauren, the voice of the white mainstream media. Bonnie, who describes Darren as a thug, wears a white dress when she interviews Jason and a white blazer and skirt when she interviews Clyde at the racist bake sale, during which she eats a vanilla cookie. When Darren is riding high at Sumwun and living extravagantly, his apartment is entirely decorated in white, and he sleeps with a white woman wearing a white dress despite Wally Cat’s advice that having sex with white women is a bad idea.

In the second half of the book, Askaripour flips the relationship between white and black/brown around: white surfaces get browned or blackened. When Brian shows up at Darren’s apartment for his first sales lesson, he cracks open a can of cola that Darren tosses to him, “sending brown sugar water all over the white walls, white chairs, and white floors” (238). When Rose shows up with Brian, dressed in her usual black punk/metal ensemble, Darren is horrified by the way she puts “her dirty leather boots on [the] white oak coffee table”; when he asks her to leave, she threatens, “Either you let me stay and your couch stays how you probably like your women, white and pretty, or […] I drive my muddy boots into the cushions” (255). When Brian and Rose come to Darren wanting to learn the sales skills that have made him successful, they are bringing Blackness into what has otherwise been a very white domain. Darren’s white apartment is a metaphor for how he, until this pivotal point in the text, assimilated to conform to the behavior of his white colleagues: he is even ingesting whiteness, in the form of cocaine. Now, Brian and Rose arrive to upend his white-oriented perspective, and the motifs of brown and black substances marking Darren’s white apartment reinforce this turning point in the plot.

Toward the end of the book, Darren shifts his focus away from whiteness and begins devoting his energies to enriching the lives of BIPOC people. He plans to leave his white apartment, and all it represents, behind. His impassioned and evocative speech about childhood hopes crushed by obstacles to opportunity manages to penetrate the hostility the white audience has to him and to Happy Campers. Askaripour highlights this thematic element using the black/white motif: Bonnie Sauren is moved by Darren’s speech, and “[a] tear of mascara roll[s] down her cheek, staining her signature white dress” (364). Though Darren has no illusions about permanently changing people’s minds—indeed, Bonnie goes on to write a best-selling book called White Offense: Why Being White Is Quite Alright (380)—he feels that even this small instance of making a positive mark on hostile white ideology is progress.