Matt Cochran Mr. Richie 5/2/2019 Literature and Social Justice Race vs. Scientific Background In the novels, The Sympathizer, by Viet Tanh Nguyen, and The Sellout, by Paul Beatty, the modern society of Dickens and the society surrounding Vietnam explore the concepts of race, social background, and social class to demonstrate how each concept has no scientific background or evidence and are rather a social construct created by humankind. Through Beatty’s use of satire, the main character, Bonbon, exhibits extreme types of scenarios such as owning slaves, to demonstrate how a certain scientific background does not directly affect one’s place in society. Similarly, the narrator’s appreciation for Western culture in The Sympathizer, also reflects how anyone can be influenced by a foreign civilization regardless of their scientific origin. Through Beatty’s use of satirical and extreme examples of differences in race and social injustice and Nguyen’s use of the narrator desiring to become an American and live the American Dream, the authors demonstrate how race and racism does not have a scientific basis but is in fact only a social construct. By all means, Beatty and Nguyen both display a complex situation of social status in their novels to prove how race and minority groups in America seem to be at a disadvantage because modern society places many obstacles in the way of their success. For instance, in The Sellout, Beatty uses satire to make a statement on the jobs available for and presented to minority children at their career day when he says, “Shelia and I changed places, clambering over and under one another without taking any weight off the helpless calf. When I got to the back end, I handed her the knife and the emasculator, which, like garden shears they resembled, and any other good tool, does exactly what its name says it’s going to do. Two pints of blood, a surprisingly daft removal of the top half of the scrotum, an artful yank of the testes into the open air, an audible crunching severing of the spermatic cord, a schoolyard of shrieking pupils, teachers, and one sexually frustrated calf later, I finished up my lecture for the benefit of Sheila Clark (Beatty, 161).” In his example, Beatty uses situational irony because his audience would expect a career fair to consist of exciting, well-paying, and challenging professions such as doctors, firefighters, police officers, or scientists but instead these children are being shown how to castrate a calf. Even though these children may be intelligent and capable enough to be successful in life, from an early age they are not given the option merely because society assumes that they are not capable. Similarly, in The Sympathizer, Nguyen portrays how Americans often place certain groups of people into what they see as their place in society solely based on superficial characteristics such as the color of their skin or where they come from. Nguyen displays his point when he says, “Awaiting us was another refugee camp, its higher grade of amenities evidence that we already profiting from the upward mobility of the American Dream. Whereas on Guam most of the refugees had lived under tents hastily erected by the marines (Nguyen, 55).” Nguyen uses sarcasm such as “awaiting us was another refugee camp” and “evidence that we already profiting from the upward mobility of the American Dream,” to prove how American society appears to think they are helping the refuges by putting them in camps but in reality they are isolating them and limiting their opportunities to succeed. People in both novels are being grouped based upon physical characteristics and origins and not by their internal characteristics. According to Elizabeth Kolbert, an author for National Geographic, “genetic research has revealed two deep truths about people. The first is that all humans are closely related—more closely related than all chimps, even though there are many more humans around today. Everyone has the same collection of genes, but with the exception of identical twins, everyone has slightly different versions of some of them. Studies of this genetic diversity have allowed scientists to reconstruct a kind of family tree of human populations. That has revealed the second-deep truth: In a very real sense, all people alive today are Africans (Kolbert, 3)” Based on scientific research, we all have the same genes and that race to humans is like breeds to dogs and we should not be treating each-other poorly based on minor physical differences.
