Adam Mansbach’s Postracial Imaginary in Angry Black White Boy

This chapter discusses the implications of cultural production oftentimes associated with blackness by nonblack people, arguing that Adam Mansbach’s satirical novel Angry Black White Boy (2005) serves as an exploration into a postracial imaginary that thinks about the future of resistance and race in America. Mansbach creates this postracial imaginary by juxtaposing the ostensibly postracial, neo-passing site of his protagonist that is mistaken for black in the narrative with the protagonist’s white privilege. Unlike his protagonist, Mansbach utilizes popular tropes from black satirists—such as disrupting the notion of race, intraracial self-reflexivity, and an awareness that race is both socially constructed and a political reality—in nonappropriative and nonconsumptive ways.