Analysis Of Topdog Underdog

It is all a game, the institutions that individuals live in and system they abide to is a game. One could assume their fate is determined by personal choices and opportunities, but there is more that comes to play, especially when one is black in America. The system is rigged against African Americans and in Topdog/Underdog, Suzan-Lori Parks uses her characters, Lincoln and Booth, to explain the unjust, racist system that puts down Black people. She uses a card game to explain how the system is unfair and how people fall into traps of the system, and at the end, implies that an unjust system can lead to violence.
When it comes to the card game, Lincoln is the game master, the dealer. Parks uses him and his game to reference or be a reflection

The illusion of freedom and self-determination is so strong because the dealer’s accomplices disguise themselves as regular people, when they are actually part of the trick. As Lincoln told Booth when he first started teaching him the game, “Everybody out there is part of the crowd. His crew is part of the crowd, he himself is part of the crowd” (Parks 73). The dealer, or the top-dog, and his crew is part of the target’s environment. They might be random strangers, but also people one would interact with every day. They could be a neighbor, a friend, and even a person’s own family, and within this book, one’s own brother. People who are not in on the game are helpless victims that fall trap in the system. Lincoln is the topdog in his little card game, and he plays his brother like how the system plays him. Although Lincoln plays the underdog as a black man in the work force, within the realm of the card game, he represents the

Booth watches Lincoln for a while and Booth thinks he has it all figured out, but Lincoln comes in and tells him otherwise. Lincoln explains that “You wanna hustle 3-card monte, you gotta do it right, you gotta break it down. Practice it in smaller bits. Yr trying to do the whole things at once that’s why you keep fucking up” (Parks 16). Booth fails at being a new dealer because he tries to tackle the game as a whole when there are layers within the game. It is a complicated system that needs to be understood piece by piece. To bring this back to the bigger racist institution that puts down Black folks in America, the system is a system that is built upon generations and to think that it can be understood and controlled fully by just watching and learning is naïve, and Parks is saying that that is why people fail to bring down the system and make it work in their favor. The only way to tackle the system is to break it apart and work on it piece by piece, but this process is long and the victims cannot