Percival Everett published the dark comedy satire Erasure in 2001. A year prior, Spike Lee released his satire Bamboozled. Both seem to be about a black male protagonist who doesn’t fit what most think of as black men. They’re both highly educated, sophisticated intellectuals. Yet they are constantly criticized by those around them for how they behave.
So, they both decide to create something that would be so racist and prejudice if it was made by a white person. Intended as a joke, what they produce becomes an unexpected huge hit with critics and audiences. In Bamboozled, Damon Wayans played a TV executive who is under scrutiny for the ideas he comes up as they are dismissed by the predominantly white supervisors as “not black enough” or too much like The Cosby Show. In an attempt to get fired, he creates a minstrel show where people will wear blackface, even if they are black, perpetuate stereotypes and use racial slurs. The show becomes a huge hit.
In Erasure, Thelonius “Monk” Ellison is a professor of English literature who has published several books. But most of them have been dismissed because they’re not “black enough.” Upon hearing that a first-time writer, Juanita Mae Jenkins, from the Midwest wrote a cliched novel We’s Live in Da Ghetto, that is getting a lot of attention, he decides to write his own work of fiction somewhat out of spite. Jenkins gives interviews saying she didn’t really grow up this way but people buy her novel anyway.
It’s two books in one. Halfway through the novel switches gears as we focus on a young black man who is called Van Go who gets women pregnant and rapes others. He’s interested in doing nothing but robbing and shaking people down. Initially titled My Pafology, his agent sends it out only both of their surprise, it gets accepted for publication. However, Monk protects his rep by having it published under a pen name, Stagg R. Leigh.
Monk needs the money to help put his mother, Agnes, in a good nursing home as her Alzheimer’s Disease has made her impossible to live alone with the aging housekeeper, Lorraine. The family is also dealing with a family tragedy as Monk’s daughter, Lisa, was fatally shot by anti-abortion activists outside a clinic in the Washington, D.C. area. Monk’s brother, Cliff, a doctor as well, is dealing with his own personal problems having come out as gay and dealing with life as a divorced father.
The Ellisons are all upper class but Monk’s feels like an outsider among both black and white people. The book’s title is changed to Fuck and Monk decides to take a position on a panel of literary judges. And he discovers that his own novel is one of the books intended to be reviewed. The judges are excited for the novel which paints Monk in a position of how to handle the possibility of the novel being the big winner.
More than a critique of racial stereotypes, Erasure itself is more of a criticism of the literary world in itself. What makes a book good? How many books have you read in school or college that you just couldn’t get through? This is what turns people off reading after they get out of school. Maybe people want to read a silly book by James Patterson or Stephen King. It’s 2024 and we still seem to have a cut-off date for the “classics” of literature. And the judges all seem to be pompous literary types.
Everett has been publishing novels since the early 1980s. You probably haven’t heard of them or Everett himself if Erasure wasn’t used as the basis for the Oscar-winning American Fiction, which has received almost universal critical acclaim. Everett, Lee and filmmaker Robert Townsend, who tackled similar issues in Hollywood Shuffle, know the story, and they use humor to drive the point home harder. There’s white people of all socioeconomic backgrounds that don’t like seeing black people succeed. And it’s not just white people but people of other colors.
When filmmakers like John Singleton and the Hughes Brothers came out in the 1990s, they made “Growing up in the Hood” movies which seemed to be running the course by the time the Wayans parodied the genre with Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood. In between, there was the 1994 romantic comedy The Inkwell, which didn’t get good reviews or make much at the box office, yet it became a cult classic. The movie starred Larenz Tate who also appeared in Menace II Society but it was about black people spending the summer of 1976 on Martha’s Vineyard, so naturally the general public wasn’t interested in that.
Growing up in the South, I despise Southern Gothic literature mainly because it romanticizes a bygone era that never really existed. Southern Gothic, just like Hood movies, only portray negative stereotypes. This is why I think Fannie Flagg wrote Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe as a parody of literature by Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner. Flagg played more on the same-sex romantic relationship in the novel while the movie hinted at it with a few subtle scenes (i.e the honey scene and especially the food fight scene).
But like Everett, Lee and others have shown, whenever you try to shake up the notion, people resist. I wasn’t surprised that I heard from black who went to school in the 2000s and even 2010s that teachers expected them to rap their oral presentations in classes. But Everett and Monk as the narrator also seem to have a criticism of their own people. When Monk meets family of Lorraine at her wedding, he senses the cultural divide between the two as well recalling events from his childhood.
Even here in Oklahoma with a lot of Indigenous Native Americans around, it seems that you’re either a cowboy of Indigenous. And if you’re Indigenous, you should practice a certain way that honors your ancestors. That’s what irritated me about Reservation Dogs. A lot of people bought the stereotype and praised the series. It even won a freaking Peabody Award. However, if someone just made a series about an Indigenous Native American family or group of people who just deal with problems like they did on Modern Family, Friends, Cheers, Seinfeld, The Big Bang Theory, etc., would people still tune in?
It seems that the general public (i.e. white people) only want to see the same stereotypes they themselves have created portrayed in movies, TV shows and books. And those who have to performed these roles or write these bodies of work do so to give the public what they want. It’s a victory lap but they haven’t really won anything.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 