The Sellout by Paul Beatty Page A

where a bar graph titled “Income Disparity as Determined by Race” hovered overhead like some dark, damning, statistical cumulonimbus cloud threatening to rain on our collective parades.
    “I was wondering what that li’l nigger was doing in a donut shop with a damn overhead projector.”
    Next thing the people knew, my father, interspersed with a macroeconomics circulation flowchart there, a sketch of Milton Friedman here, was facilitating an impromptu seminar about the evils of deregulation and institutional racism. How it wasn’t the Keynesian lapdogs so beloved by the banks and the media who predicted the most recent financial meltdown but the behavioral economists who knew that the market isn’t swayed by interest rates and fluctuations in GDP, rather by greed, fear, and fiscal illusion. The discussion grew animated. Their mouths stuffed with pastries, their lips flaked with coconut shavings, the Dum Dum Donuts patrons decried low-interest checking and the nerve of the goddamn cable company to charge late fees for not promptly paying ahead of time in July for services not rendered until August. One woman, her jowls filled to near bursting with macaroons, asked my father, “How much the Chinos make?”
    “Well, Asian men earn more than any other demographic.”
    “Even the faggots?” shouted the assistant manager. “You sure Asians make more than the faggots? ’Cause I hear faggots be making cash hand over fist.”
    “Yes, even the homosexuals, but remember, Asian men have no power.”
    “And what about the gay Asian males? Have you done a regression analysis controlling for race and sexual orientation?” That insightful comment came from Foy Cheshire, about ten years older than my dad, standing next to the water fountain, hands in his pockets, and wearing a wool sweater, even though it was 75 degrees outside. This was way before the money and fame. Back then he was an assistant professor in urban studies, at UC Brentwood, living in Larchmont with the rest of the L.A. intellectual class, and hanging out in Dickens doing field research for his first book, Blacktopolis: The Intransigence of African-American Urban Poverty and Baggy Clothes. “I think an examination of the confluence of independent variables on income could result in some interesting r coefficients. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised by p values in the .75 range.”
    Despite the smug attitude, Pops took a liking to Foy right away. Though Foy was born and raised in Michigan, it wasn’t often Dad found somebody in Dickens who knew the difference between a t-test and an analysis of variance. After debriefing over a box of donut holes, everyone—locals and Foy included—agreed to meet on a regular basis, and the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals were born. But where my father saw an opportunity for information exchange, public advocacy, and communal counsel, Foy saw a midlife springboard to fame. Things between the two of them started amicably enough. They strategized and chased women together. But after a few years, Foy Cheshire got famous and my father never did. Foy was no deep thinker, but back then he was infinitely better organized than my dad, whose main strength was also his biggest weakness—he was way ahead of his time. While my dad was writing incomprehensible and unpublishable theories linking black oppression, game and social learning theory, Foy hosted a television talk show. Interviewing B-list celebrities and political figures, writing magazine articles, and taking meetings in Hollywood.
    Once, while watching my father typing away at his desk, I asked him where his ideas came from. He turned around, his tongue thick with Scotch whiskey, and said, “The real question is not where do ideas come from but where do they go.”
    “So where do they go?”
    “Punk motherfuckers like Foy Cheshire steal them and make not-so-small fortunes off your shit and invite you to the launch party like nothing happened.”
    The idea that Foy stole