After learning about his talent in basketball and viewing his high SAT score, many colleges began recruiting Gunnar Kaufman in the White Boy Shuffle. Gunnar was given many opportunities, one specifically by a black Harvard recruiter. The recruiter was an interesting contrast to the black men that we saw in the story. His extreme richness and education seemed to have an adverse effect on his view of black society and caused him to become greedy.
At the beginning of the night, the recruiter first took Gunnar out for dinner to a fancy restaurant. At the restaurant, Gunnar noticed that the recruiter wore gold rings, owned a pocket watch, and said “nightcap” which was the first time Gunnar had seen a black man with those type of things. The recruiter then took Gunnar to his home in Cheviot Heights, a rich neighborhood in LA that was near Hillside. After talking for a bit with Gunnar, the recruiter frankly explained that he was in it for the money; if Gunnar went to Harvard he would receive seventy-five thousand dollars to buy a new motorhome. His first motorhome was apparently destroyed from the rowdies “down there”, or, Hillside. The recruiter said that the “entire community is a Petri dish for criminal vermin” and that the “poor people are beyond help”. The only reason the recruiter helped them was to reinforce the difference between him and them. His words show how he views minorities of a lower status than him, and it sort of gives the impression that his high wealth an education caused him to have these ideas. This was something we looked into with Invisible Man.
In Invisible Man we explored the idea that education was harmful to people of color as it causes a sense of superiorness. “The ‘educated negroes’ have an attitude of contempt towards their own people because [...] Negroes are taught to admire the Hebrew, the Greek, the Latin, and the Teuton and to despise the African,” (http://aalmaya.blogspot.com/). In the case of the recruiter, it seems as if his status caused him to look down upon Hillside. He stereotypes the neighborhood and claims that it has no hope. Education and wealth seemed to push down the veil.
It was very clear that the recruiter wasn't doing a very good job of inviting Gunnar to come to Harvard. To most people the idea of money is the most important thing in their lives and since to the recruiter Gunnar was a "diamond in the rough" he thought Gunnar could be bought out of poverty. However the education and ideals that Gunnar held allowed him to reject the recruiter and run away. Just another way to view the education Gunnar received.
ReplyDeleteThe Harvard recruiter represents Beatty's satire at its strongest--he so clearly assumes that Gunnar views education solely as a way to separate himself from communities like Hillside (even as he seems totally unaware that this is where Gunnar lives, since he goes to school in the Valley), and this attitude indeed has roots at least as far back as Bledsoe in _Invisible Man_, wanting to assert the college's distance from people like Trueblood.
ReplyDeleteThe irony, of course, is that he's totally unaware that the kids who trashed his RV included Gunnar himself--one more way that he occupies multiple roles for multiple people in this novel, an honors student gifted in poetry who is also gifted in basketball and runs with the Gun Totin' Hooligans. The recruiter's worldview can't contain such a seemingly contradictory character.
The Harvard recruiter also seems to forget that Gunnar himself lives there. He likes his neighborhood and his friends, and he doesn't see himself as better than them. Gunnar's analytical style of thinking seems more susceptible to learning through experience and through the types of people he meets compared to formal education and "superiority" that the recruiter is pushing onto him.
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