Satire that does what it's supposed to do

How to Rent a Negro by damali ayo

Satire has a long and noble history, as an effective means of making injustice, hypocrisy, and all manner of society’s ills perfectly clear. When done well, it teaches and enlightens, makes the reader more able to see the faults in herself and her society to which she may have previously been blind.

Starting with a conceit that Jonathan Swift would have appreciated for its combination of audacious offensiveness and paradigmatic perfection, damali ayo deftly skewers many of the things that white people do to demonstrate their complete lack of cluefulness about even the most basic guidelines of civil communication when they/we deal with people of colour, not to mention many of the things that white people think, day and do to prove to themselves that they/we are not racist, while simultaneously justifying their/our racist actions, words and beliefs.

The genesis for the book is in the website rent-a-negro.com, which was created by ayo as a work of performance art satirising race relations in the US (I can assure you, however, that much of the material is directly applicable to race relations in Canada, and where it isn’t, white Canadians have their/our own analogues, such as trying to get black people to agree that Canadians can’t be racist because of the Underground Railway).

In choosing to satirically re-frame the such problematic interactions as “rentals,” ayo underscores the ways in which white people objectify people of colour – one hires people but rents things. The book presents a very long list of how black people are used, marginalised, exoticised and denied agency, identity and individuality, all cast in the conceit of “renting” black people to perform specific acts with monetary values assigned to services thus rendered: these “rental” services cover the spectrum of insult and injury from being used as a token to demonstrate the diversity of a company, organisation, or social group, to being expected to answer for “what (all) blacks think about X,” to physical assaults ranging hair touching to police violence.

In fact, what this carefully crafted litany of everyday insults endured by blacks (and other people of colour) makes painfully clear is how profoundly ingrained and institutionalised racism continues to affect respect for the essential humanity of people of colour in North America today. I suspect that even the most committed white ally will wince at least a few times while reading this book, as they/we see some reflection of their/our own lapses in its pages.