In an interview with NPR, novelist and funnyman Paul Beatty discusses his novel The Sellout, and what’s on his mind when creating a world where plantation culture is reborn in California. The novel focuses on Bonbon, an African American man who reacts to the accidental shooting of his father by the LAPD by re-segregating his hometown and taking on a personal slave—an elderly man famous for his role in Little Rascals. Beatty reads a particularly charged passage about the trials and tribulations of being a slave owner; when asked whether he worries about his work being offensive or destructive, Beatty replies, “You know, I write to say what I have to say.”
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