Entitlement Is Not an Identity. It’s a Trap.
7 min read
In July of this year, a U.S.-based company called CrowdStrike released an update for its widely used cybersecurity software, inadvertently triggering a massive system crash. In the hours that followed, what has since been described as the “largest outage in history” affected nearly every facet of our global society. On X, the phrase Leave the world behind went viral. That is the title of Rumaan Alam’s third novel, in which a catastrophic collapse of communications strands a group of people in a vacation rental. The characters are Black and white, rich and less well-off, and over the course of the novel, Alam shows how racial and economic disparities frustrate their efforts to survive.
Alam is particularly skilled at depicting the forces that unite and divide us, and his latest novel, Entitlement, is similarly preoccupied with questions of race and class. Set in 2013 in New York City, Entitlement is full of people who exist in a rarefied bubble: They are graduates of elite colleges and inheritors of impressive trust funds. One of the novel’s main characters is an ultra-wealthy philanthropist who is attempting to build his legacy by contributing to the worthiest causes—or those that will at least grant him a measure of posthumous acclaim.
The novel’s protagonist is pressing up against that bubble. She is a familiar literary figure, a striver who has gained entry into an exclusive realm—in this case the elite world of philanthropy—and is desperate to remain. She’s also a Black woman. She plays her part well throughout the novel (she works hard, dresses impeccably, and has an eye for art), and she is amply rewarded. Yet despite her private-school pedigree (this isn’t quite a rags-to-riches tale), her ultimate ambition remains tantalizingly out of reach. Entitlement, a barbed, voluble book, is about how certain immutable traits, sex and race among them, persist as fundamental forces that shape our lives no matter how we might attempt to deny or overlook them. It’s also about what happens when status becomes a placeholder for identity.
We first meet Brooke Orr as she is taking the subway to work. She’s on her way to the vaguely defined family foundation where she’s recently landed a job, and she and her fellow commuters are on high alert because someone has been terrorizing the New York City subway system, a “lunatic … who [is] jabbing unsuspecting commuters with a hypodermic.” She arrives late to a meeting in which Asher Jaffee, a wealthy co-founder of the foundation, is holding forth about various topics, including what he could accomplish if he were the mayor of New York. Brooke rolls her eyes at this; Asher notices and lightly reprimands her, but he’s also intrigued by this seemingly fearless woman.
Brooke and Asher soon develop a close relationship, which will evolve, strengthen, and falter over the course of the novel. Asher is the brilliant, doting instructor and Brooke the eager student. They are opposites in almost every sense: He is a white octogenarian billionaire with an enviable art collection and extensive real-estate portfolio; she is a 33-year-oldBlack woman who is attempting to revive her career after a false start as a teacher. She is unsure of her place in her family and community, searching for a cause to embrace.
Asher rightly suspects that she is something of a blank canvas upon which he can project his desires. This is partly because of Brooke’s blinkered relationship with her racial background. Alam implies that Brooke did not spend much time around Black people as a child; as an adult, she often seems uncomfortable around them. When Asher’s Black driver attempts to initiate a conversation about his daughters, Brooke is “cool to him.” Later, when a Black woman who is running for city council seeks to form a connection, she resists:
Brooke had heard this all before. The power of tribe. Even if they looked one way, they were nothing alike—a church girl from Brooklyn, with a vast network of cousins and vague relations, and a private-school kid from Manhattan with a white mother, a white brother, many white aunties. Brooke spent most of her time with white people, who never discussed the allegiance of race, because they did not need to. Somehow to hear it thus seemed demeaning. Brooke didn’t want to be used.
The fact that Brooke interprets the woman’s approach as a manipulation is instructive. Brooke perceives her Black skin as an incidental aspect of her biological makeup, not as a physical trait that demands social acknowledgement.
But though Brooke dismisses her race in personal interactions, she is acutely aware of its significance in her professional life. Asher asks Brooke to find a suitable target for his philanthropy, and she eventually settles on an after-school dance program in Brooklyn. She makes this choice not out of a sense of solidarity with the children or the Black woman who runs it but because she knows her boss will approve: “Brooke knew what was expected by every teacher, by every professor, by every boss, by every coworker, and now by Asher. He’d want the story of Black kids with Black problems.”
We learn surprisingly little about Brooke’s internal life throughout the novel; Alam doesn’t reveal many of her preoccupations beyond her dedication to impressing Asher—and, as the novel progresses, her goal of purchasing an apartment despite her limited funds. She remains merely a sketch, a vector of ambition. She doesn’t have many friends and she doesn’t seem especially close with her family; her drive for success seems to have little motivation beyond her desire for what others have. This is a core element of the novel, but also a narrative shortcoming: We don’t get to know her, because she doesn’t really know herself.
In this novel, who Brooke is is less important than how she serves the story. Her refusal (or inability) to fully engage with her background prevents her from understanding how she’s seen by the rest of the world, whether that’s another Black woman who is hoping for connection or a rich white man who expects her to find a Black organization that might be worthy of his dollars. She fails to recognize that it is not the Black woman who is exploiting her but rather the white man who is using her to serve his own agenda.
Brooke’s blind spot reflects broader misconceptions about how people of color and other marginalized groups can achieve success. Alam skillfully demonstrates how the notion of entitlement papers over the gap between the fantasy of the American dream and the reality of American life. Brooke comes to believe that she is entitled, because of her intelligence and work ethic, to the privileges that others enjoy but she eventually learns that only a select few can grab what they want.
One of Brooke’s problems is that she inhabits, however tenuously, a realm filled with takers who define themselves by what they have—forcing Brooke to define herself by what she lacks. She understands that in this milieu, money is tangentially connected to effort; some are simply handed immense fortunes once they reach a certain age, and others do nothing as their bank accounts grow effortlessly. Her frustration mounts as she watches her friends accrue wealth and privilege—not just because she envies their resources, though that is certainly the case. As Alam writes, Brooke “wanted what people most wanted and was the thing that rich people hoarded: not money, but the grace of God and the universe, a way to be in the world and enjoy it. She wanted selfhood.”
This, in a way, is the ultimate entitlement—the ability to be who you want to be. Brooke, however, isn’t sure whom she would like to be, because she is unmoored. Her ambition strains her relationships with her friends and family, and she lacks any other support system. Inspired by her interactions with Asher, she eventually seeks to form an identity based on her pursuit of (and fealty to) privilege. As the story unfolds, she tries to create her ideal self by purchasing personal items with her company card and deceiving her bank about her resources to secure a mortgage. What she must learn is that you can’t buy your way to selfhood.
In the end, Brooke’s struggle reveals a deeper truth: That in a society in which the circumstances of birth still dictate much of one’s fate, the pursuit of fulfillment is fruitless without an honest understanding of the forces that shape and constrain it. Entitlement captures this dilemma, showing that although ambition and intelligence may open doors, the ultimate prize—true autonomy and agency—remains elusive for almost everyone. Brooke’s journey is a poignant reminder that, for most people, entitlement is not an identity but a trap.
When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supportingThe Atlantic.
