"Post-Racial" Segregation in The Sellout Anonymous College

“Post-Racial” Segregation Set in “post-racial” America, specifically following the election of Barack Obama in 2008, Paul Betty’s The Sellout illustrates the discrimination that presently plagues the black community in America, and the prevalence of America’s past, regarding racial relations, in the present. Beatty suggests that the perceived diminishment of racism towards black people in America since the end of slavery deviates greatly from the reality of the situation. In his novel, Beatty critiques the impression of many Americans that racism is coming to a tail end through the representations of the inexplicable behavior of Hominy, extreme racial stereotypes, the divide between the narrator and his past, and the narrator’s efforts to revive America’s dark racial past. Beatty uses the character of Hominy Jenkins to effectively comment on how America’s past, in relation with the treatment of blacks, persists in present day.

Hominy Jenkins is a slave to the narrator, voluntarily, despite the narrator’s best efforts to “emancipate, manumit, set free, permanently discharge, and dismiss” (82) Hominy. Hominy is more than reluctant to accept freedom, commenting that “true freedom is having the right to be a slave.” (83) Hominy’s...