Stuck

            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.