White Boy Shuffle has been interesting for me to read because, despite the occasional (and I'm sure intentional) departures from realism for the sake of advancing a point, it's a pretty realistic book about growing up in modern America. It's about something I've experienced, so can relate to in a way I couldn't with the other books we've read. The issue for me is, while often I can relate to Gunnar's awkwardness and the stresses of moving and what not, objectively, the characters that are most similar to me are the obnoxious, privileged white kids. I too had a second grade class with like one black kid, but I wasn't that kid. I was the white girl who ate up, without question, the teacher's doctrine about colorblindness, and scorned those who answered questions wrong (there really wasn't much sarcasm or snark in second grade, but I probably wouldn't have appreciated that either).

The scene that got to me the most was the Shakespeare competition. The students from Gunnar's school are very familiar with the material and end up failing because of the pressure put on them by the perfect, advantaged white performances, with full costumes and everything. I have been those advantaged white kids. It made me feel somewhat icky then, but even ickier now, after reading that passage. On top of that, Gunnar portrayed the liberal white encouragement and pity as extremely patronizing so I feel icky for having felt icky. 

The analogies to the Shakespeare competition ring unfortunately true with my experience at Science Olympiad last year. We didn't have a coach or any funding or even enough people on our team so we kinda fancied ourselves the underdogs. We didn't even try very hard. One of the machines was made with a paperclip and some string literally 5 minutes before it was due. Iulianna and I were assigned to an event two days before the competition so we said our non-existent machine "had some complications" so that we could take the written test we hadn't studied for and get a couple points (don't tell the Science Olympiad people). And (though we didn't win those two events) our team still won overall by a healthy margin. And I thought, "Wow. That seems unfair. Those other teams tried harder." The idea that maybe the pressure put on other schools by our nerdiness could have played a part in our victory makes it even worse.
Although, it was kind of turned around on us at state, seeing all those other teams from out of town, trailing posies of supporters and wearing particularly expensive looking t-shirts. At least we were able to use their superior means as an excuse for not winning, which I suppose Gunnar sort of did too. It's a shame that the expectations of the other teams and the judges become self fulfilling prophesies, but that doesn't exactly mean they're at fault. Though they ideally shouldn't have to, Gunnar's team could have fought through the anxiety. And, actually I don't think that Beatty is exactly blaming anyone in this passage (well, maybe the judges). I mean, what could they have done? Inequality like this is bad, and as individuals who are part of the system we are somewhat at fault, but it's not clear what we (as privileged competitors) can actually do to fix the problem.