these wrongs don't make a Wright

                For all his vices, Adam Mansbach has certainly done his research: Angry Black White Boy is dripping with obscure hip-hop references, Macon flaunts his ability to name-drop black nationalists and his knowledge of five-percenter philosophy, and it’s all underpinned with what seems to be a comprehensive understanding of the historical circumstances that shaped American race relations into what they are today. In all of this, the black literary canon isn’t left out: there are references, allusions, and even parallel scenes relating to many of those influential works. It’s clear Mansbach knows his stuff. Which makes it even more incomprehensible why he and his publishers would think it was a good idea to include a review saying “Adam Mansbach is the white Richard Wright, and Angry Black White Boy is our generation’s Native Son” prominently featured on the back cover of this novel.
                 In general, it’s pretty pretentious to compare yourself to another author whose works are still read and studied almost 80 years after they were published when your own book lacks even a Sparknotes summary (much to the chagrin of us all. RIP my quiz grades again), but what’s even more audacious is that in this novel Mansbach seems to be purposefully and visibly trying to evoke references from Richard Wright's Native Son and other iconic works by black authors. Macon finds himself in a jail cell, just like Bigger Thomas (although unlike Bigger he knows he can easily escape and has no life-changing revelation). Like the nameless narrator of Invisible Man, he makes a foray into trying to organize for social change by visiting the black student union like the narrator did with the Brotherhood. There are more echoes of Invisible Man, too, with Macon holed up in his room ruminating on Fleet Walker and trying to figure out his own place in the world, and the novel’s structure where we get the preliminary note that ambiguously gives some details about the ending; we’ll see as the novel finishes whether the ending structure is similar as well.
                Of all these references, the most infuriating similarity is between this novel and Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle. The White Boy Shuffle began with Gunnar’s letter to the nation detailing the planned mass suicide; in that context it was an interesting twist on Invisible Man’s opening chapter, where we also get an unexplainable view of the narrator’s ending situation and the rest of the novel serves to justify how he got there. In Angry Black White Boy, we also get a letter to begin, but as a rhetorical device it’s a lot less convincing when it’s being used a third time and when, unlike the other two characters, the Macon who’d write that letter is immediately recognizable from the very first chapter. The two novels’ main characters, Macon and Gunnar Kaufman, are uncannily similar; both are (approximately) 2000s-era teenagers sulking around big cities with the Rodney King riots as pivotal moments in their lives, both attend a prestigious college but rapidly become disillusioned by it, rebel against their tacitly racist family backgrounds, and decide on drastic measures to solve the problem. By the end, The White Boy Shuffle rapidly flies into insanity, and the farther we get into Angry Black White Boy the more the rhythm of the plot seems as if it's heading in the  same direction. 
                  But by far the most egregious thing about this is the narrative voice. Gunnar's narration, spiked with poetry and hilarious insights, was in my opinion one of the best parts of reading The White Boy Shuffle, and Angry White Black Boy seems like it’s trying to piggyback on exactly the same thing, in exactly the same style. Maybe it's symbolic that Gunnar Kaufman uses his graffiti skills to spread poetry and enlightened social consciousness, while Macon spent eight years perfecting how to write his name, because it seems a lot like that's what's happening with these two novels as well. The style of narration in The White Boy Shuffle has an undeniable purpose: the jokes in the text are carefully calibrated satire that makes you simultaneously laugh and reconsider your racial ideas, the soundtrack of rap, jazz, and beatnik poetry serve as part of Beatty's semi-critique of hip-hop culture, while at the same time exploring the influence of those art forms on American society, and Gunnar himself is a character that forces the reader to confront their own role as consumers of the novel. In Angry Black White Boy, there are versions of all of these elements, but the main purpose is no lofty societal critique, but instead, to assure the reader that Mansbach is enough of an authority on black culture to be trusted to write a novel about it. Just like Macon perfecting his tag, maybe Mansbach is successful in fluidly regaling us with black nationalist philosophy, but in contrast to Beatty, it's hard to see what literary value it holds besides being a spray-painted Mansbach insignia on top of other artists' work.
                 I guess the thing about this book that annoys me is I just can’t understand why Mansbach thought it was necessary to write it, and especially, why he chose to so blatantly try to position himself in the tradition of black writers before him in doing so. In African-American Lit last semester, one of the most interesting aspects, to me, was how each of the novels we read built on the one before it, with references and allusions that took the same recurring themes and looked at them from new directions. All of these novels worked together in conversation to create a narrative that articulated a wide variety of the experiences of black people facing racism and oppression. Judging from my own experiences, I would probably agree with Mansbach in saying most white people, (including myself before that class, and now still), could learn a lot by understanding those novels. But learning about black literature as a white person is very different from writing a novel as a white person that inserts itself into that tradition, and this is where I think that Mansbach goes too far. Maybe the fact that he’s at least trying is, like Macon’s antics, somewhat admirable, and maybe Macon as a character raises some fascinating questions that should be addressed. But I think if you’re a white guy writing a race novel, you shouldn’t pretend to be anything but a white guy writing a race novel. Make yourself this generation’s Mansbach, if you’re so inclined, create a new genre of literature miraculously crafted to strip white people of our every prejudice with a single reading --- but Wright's already taken. And writing a novel whose every sentence clangs like a cheap imitation of Gunnar Kaufman's poetry and overflows with references overheard by eavesdropping on Ellison and Wright himself, seems at best, ignorant, and at worst, the twenty-first-century iteration of Jan’s well-intentioned screwups that threw Bigger Thomas under the bus in the first place.