In Benji’s eyes, there are two ways that black people in his
situation can go: they can either try as hard as they can to avoid every
stereotype possible, or they can pick one, embrace it, and dare others to
ridicule them. He sees the downsides of both approaches: his parents’
constrained, dissatisfied lives, constantly obsessed with what others are
thinking of them, and his peers’ performative stereotypes. The split mostly
falls along generational lines: his parents and their friends aim for
respectability (to take a word from Mr. Sutton), while his friends see the toll
this takes on their parents and try to get as far from that as possible.
One option – embracing the
stereotypes – is primarily found among his peers. They are a generation removed
from the civil rights movement, and they have grown up hearing that they need
to fight for their rights, for their dignity. At the same time, they aren’t
growing up with the same hardships that the generations before them had – they are
well-off, go to prep schools, have legal equality with white people, and most
of the racism they encounter is small acts of microaggression rather than
intentional violence. They want to continue the fight, but aren’t sure how to
do so. From Benji’s perspective, this is done to provoke a reaction, to push
society’s arbitrary limits on what black people “should” be. However, coming
from these kids it is artifice, not genuine. At one point Benji says, “Such
rebellion was inherently self-conscious, overly determined. It doth protest too
much, described an inner conflict as big as that of the watermelon-avoiders. We
were all of us stuck, whether we wanted to admit it or not. We were people, not
performance artists, all appearances to the contrary”.
It takes a while before we really
see the full impact of Benji’s parents’ mindset. As Benji describes them, they
make a “Cosby family”. They fit into the same categories as the Cosbys, sure –
well-off, educated, professional, respectable to mainstream white eyes. But it
goes deeper than that: this is a facade just like Reggie’s “street” style.
Benji’s parents and the adults around them are always sure that someone’s
watching, scrutinizing everything they do. In reality, they are their own harshest
(and often only) critic. This stress manifests itself in different ways – his dad’s
need for control, to control what others see in his family, turns into abuse.
His mother’s need to maintain a good appearance keeps her from standing up for
herself.
Part of his dad’s reasoning for
wanting the thick paper plates is he “doesn’t want cheap shit in his house”. He
wants to prove that he’s better than the other people around him. Prove to
whom? Even his dad’s criteria for finding a good wife seem to be focused on
what other people will think – after all, “you don’t want other people talking
about how you got a whale for a wife”. Benji, however, doesn’t let himself get
caught up in this. He notes that “no one cares about what goes on in other
people’s houses. The grubby dramas. It was just us. The soundstage was empty,
the production lot scheduled for demolition. They’d turned off the electricity
long ago. We delivered our lines in the darkness”.
Benji seems to be taking another
path: to just not care. Maybe “not care” isn’t the right phrase, because he
says that he is “stuck” just like everyone else. Still, he sees how that both
lifestyles can hurt the people that live them, and are both false in much the
same way. As he tries so hard to be cool, perhaps his “uncool”-ness is the
thing that saves him – as something of an outsider, he can see what others can’t.
