58 pages • 1 hour read
Mateo AskaripourBlack Buck
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Modern-Day Reverberations of Slavery
Throughout the novel, Askaripour’s Black characters reference the transatlantic slave trade. When Clyde invites Darren to sit down to set him up for the “prank” of dumping a bucket of white paint on him, Darren likens the racist hazing he experiences at Sumwun to the Middle Passage, the perilous journey across the Atlantic from Africa to the Americas. Askaripour draws a parallel between Darren’s involvement in the exploitative labor practices at Sumwun and the exploitation of labor during chattel slavery. He also references the practices Black subjects used to contend with the many harms and restrictions they faced during slavery, and he represents his contemporary Black characters drawing on the legacy of resistance to overcome present obstacles to success: Jake’s mention of the way enslaved people passed on knowledge they acquired, despite being forbidden formal education, becomes the model for BIPOC Happy Campers to learn sales techniques and develop their own networks of influence after having been shut out of mainstream white channels of power.
Askaripour depicts the reverberations of the history of slavery as palpable and present for his Black characters. In contrast, white characters’ amnesia about slavery—and the unequal legacies of wealth and privilege versus impoverishment and social exclusion that it continues to perpetuate—prevents them from addressing the roots of inequity. Black characters see power through the tropes of slavery in ways that connect past injustice to present inequity. Describing The Duchess’s unshakeable sense of entitlement, Darren notes that she “reeked of old money and blood-splattered gallows” and imagines her at a slave auction “prying open the mouths of the ‘beasts,’ ‘savages,’ and ‘barbarians’ imported from Africa” (74). Darren connects The Duchess’s present-day family wealth and sense of their own importance to the history of slavery, which enabled some white families to amass and compound profits from the forced labor of Black people. When Rose and Jason torture Clyde, Rose raises the not-unlikely possibility that Clyde’s family has been “accruing generational wealth” by profiting off the labor of the “enslaved people they owned” (337). In his WUSS video, Clyde claims that white people “built this country with our bare hands” and “defeated the British with […] perseverance”; a Happy Camper watching the video interjects, “Enslaved people!,” thereby writing the labor and military service of Black people back into the whitewashed historical account that Clyde provides.
White wealth and power, and, indeed, the founding of the United States as a nation, depended on the enforced labor of enslaved Black people. Conversely, white people have historically kept Black people from accessing wealth and opportunity. Rose describes reporter Bonnie Sauren as a “Missy Anne-looking bitch” (326), referring to an exploitative white character in Roots, the landmark 1977 miniseries about slavery. One of the ways that Happy Campers help one another out is to warn others about any “overseerlike folks to watch out for […] to navigate that instance of the Hundred Acre Peckerwood” (307), a description that likens contemporary employment to labor on slave plantations.
Askaripour’s references to slavery often suggest a connection between chattel slavery and capitalism. Jason alludes to this point when Darren first tells him about the Happy Campers. Asking, “what’s the catch […] We become twenty-first century enslaved people to some white man on Wall Street?” (301), Jason draws a parallel between chattel slavery and finance: Both are systems of extracting profits from a vast laboring class and concentrating them amongst a few privileged individuals whose interests social institutions are designed to serve. Jason fears that the racial, and financial, inequities of slavery will persist, despite the different types of work involved. Darren’s experiences in white-dominated companies prior to founding Happy Campers justify Jason’s skepticism: At Sumwun, he is expected to tolerate Clyde’s racist hazing to provide the proper “optics” when Sumwun is under scrutiny. Rhett and other Sumwuners refuse to address issues of race and racism; “diversity,” rather than race, is what Rhett asks Darren to discuss at the conference.
Even more explicitly, Askaripour depicts Darren’s relationship to Barry Dee using language of ownership that alludes to enslavement: Accepting Barry’s conditions to the deal Darren proposes, Darren tells him, “you own me, Barry” (218). Happy Campers intends to rewrite the conditions in which white corporations profit from the labor of BIPOC individuals, but it doesn’t address another aspect of the imbrication of slavery and capitalism: the idea that capital derives from the exploitation of labor, regardless of the racial makeup of the labor force. Though Darren assures Jason that he won’t be enslaved to the white man, he does not address the way that the concentration of profit amongst a few corporations and individuals perpetuates economic inequity.
Colonization and Cultural Appropriation
Colonization and cultural appropriation—respectively, literal and figurative ways of taking over physical or ideological territory—emerge as themes in the way that Askaripour represents Sumwun’s business practices and the attitude of some of its employees. Though Sumwun doesn’t have any other Black employees when Darren starts working there, they have named their SDR teams after Black musical groups: Darren’s team is Negotiators With Attitude, for example. Sumwuners’ eagerness to engage with, and manipulate, Black cultural artifacts—without interacting with any actual Black people—is just one example of cultural appropriation. Naming the conference rooms after the holy texts of global religions—Bhagavad Gita, Torah, Qu’ran, Book of Shadows—illustrates the way that selling figures as a guiding ideology elevated to religious status in Sumwun’s corporate culture. Rhett’s habit of concluding advice or pep talks about sales with a Bible passage further emphasizes the idea that selling is a belief system. Without any substantive connection between the content of these texts and the function of the rooms, the texts become superficial window dressing. Supposedly, the conference rooms are named after faiths practiced by the assistants Sumwun connects to clients and customers. However, the company merely profits off the knowledge and labor of others; it has no connections to these beliefs systems.
Askaripour calls attention to these examples of exoticization—fetishizing cultural difference in a superficial way, without understanding the culture in question—by depicting Darren’s skepticism, and sarcasm, when he hears these titles: “In addition to being an ancient Hindu text, Bhagavad Gita was a nondescript meeting room on the thirty-sixth floor of 3 Park Avenue” (69). In highlighting the contrast between the holy text and the conference room named after it, Askaripour renders Sumwun’s naming practice ridiculous and prompts his readers to question the motivation behind it. The naming practice also prompts us to question Sumwun’s business model, which involves profiting off the cultural knowledge of others. Though the assistants provide the labor that allows Sumwun to sell its service, they aren’t shown participating in the financial rewards that the sales teams accrue.
Askaripour connects cultural appropriation to actual colonization in describing Clyde “strutting into Bhagavad Gita like a colonizer” after closing a major deal (98). By representing a successful financial transaction as political conquest, Askaripour portrays economic dominance as a parallel form of social control. In this example, whiteness plays a key role in the analogy of colonization Askaripour makes: The image of Clyde, depicted throughout the novel as the archetype of white privilege, enters the Bhagavad Gita room in a manner that calls to mind the British colonization of India. It is left for the reader to decide whether economic success always entails the inequities of power on display in this example or if the Happy Campers will achieve success without reenacting colonial power relations.
Selling as Opportunity and Freedom
Throughout the text, Askaripour represents sales techniques as methods for accessing opportunities to succeed. In the Author’s Note that opens the book, “Buck” likens Black salesmen to superheroes and cultural icons. He promises to teach readers the sales skills that will enable them to overcome the social obstacles they otherwise face: His teaching will allow those who are “stuck” but “have potential” to learn how to “sell and fix the game” (xi). The phrase “Every day is deals day” that recurs throughout the text is not only a phrase intended to motivate salespeople in their work (xi), but also a self-empowerment maxim meant to convince people of their ability to succeed in achieving their goals.
Though they have some superficial similarities—techniques such as ending a deal with the phrase “sound fair?” and the reverse close, for example—the culture of selling at Sumwun, and the culture of selling that Darren espouses at Happy Campers diverge widely in terms of the moral framework in which they are grounded and the objectives they intend to achieve. At Sumwun, salespeople purposely evoke feelings of rage prior to starting their work week. Competition and closing deals fuel partying and posturing, but the members of the Sumwun team don’t seem to have any other real goals beyond self-interested material success. When Rhett says that he “sell[s] people on the opportunity to live life to the fullest” and that they “will pay an absolute fortune for that” (29), he seems to be offering them something of value, but he is also very clear that the economic benefit to the company is the primary objective. Sumwun profits from users’ desperation and desires without guaranteeing that they will achieve what they are seeking through using the service.
Indeed, we don’t see any evidence that people are actually being helped by the services that Sumwun brokers. Rather, Sumwun seems to primarily provide services to corporate clients who use Sumwun to improve their employees’ performance, as described in the case of a deal with Virgin Airlines. Enhancing employee productivity, rather than benefitting individuals, seem to be the real goal of the service. The only depiction of an individual “noncorporate user” in the book is that of Donesha Clark, who is murdered as a result of using Sumwun’s services—hardly the “opportunity” she was seeking. Though Darren wins the TV debate with Sandra Stork, the question of Sumwun’s culpability is not really resolved.
Askaripour contrasts Sumwun’s hollow morality with Happy Campers’ sense of social purpose. When Darren learns that Rhett has been concealing Sumwun’s perilous financial situation for some time, his faith in Rhett, and in the company, falters, but he remains loyal to the company, in opposition to the critiques levied against it by friends and family. After closing the deal with Barry Dee and moving into the position of account executive, he even more fully embraces the hedonistic corporate lifestyle common at the company. It’s an empty and unsustainable life, however, as he careens from one coke-fueled day to the partying that will produce the next morning’s hangover. In this way, Darren seems to be following in Rhett’s footsteps.
However, once Darren listens to Brian, Rose, and others who want to learn from him, he develops a new sense of social responsibility. By heeding his mother’s words to pass on the knowledge he has acquired to others who could benefit from it, Darren converts selling from a self-interested means of accumulating personal wealth into an engine of community enrichment. Crucially, the Happy Campers share the wealth they amass by reinvesting in the organization to assist future participants. This is type of social investment differs from the investment of capital: They are seeking not financial returns on investment, but communal ones.
