Black Buck

Throughout the novel, Askaripour’s Black characters reference the transatlantic slave trade. When Clyde invites Darren to sit down to set him up for the “prank” of dumping a bucket of white paint on him, Darren likens the racist hazing he experiences at Sumwun to the Middle Passage, the perilous journey across the Atlantic from Africa to the Americas. Askaripour draws a parallel between Darren’s involvement in the exploitative labor practices at Sumwun and the exploitation of labor during chattel slavery. He also references the practices Black subjects used to contend with the many harms and restrictions they faced during slavery, and he represents his contemporary Black characters drawing on the legacy of resistance to overcome present obstacles to success: Jake’s mention of the way enslaved people passed on knowledge they acquired, despite being forbidden formal education, becomes the model for BIPOC Happy Campers to learn sales techniques and develop their own networks of influence after having been shut out of mainstream white channels of power.

Askaripour depicts the reverberations of the history of slavery as palpable and present for his Black characters. In contrast, white characters’ amnesia about slavery—and the unequal legacies of wealth and privilege versus impoverishment and social exclusion that it continues to perpetuate—prevents them from addressing the roots of inequity.