The White Boy Shuffle

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The White Boy Shuffle is the 1996 first novel of poet Paul Beatty. 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 spectrums of American life with a reckless zeal and zaniness rarely found outside of stand-up comedy.

It has been suggested by Mark Anthony Neal¹ 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".