Stereotypes Exposed In Percival Everett's Erasure

Most of the world is racist. This is the simple and ugly truth. The novel “Erasure” by Percival Everett does a wonderful job depicting the notion that the masses want to categorize people and will reject people who break out of this mold. Depci and Tanritanir state that

Everett with Erasure undermines the standardized representations of so-called African- American experience while also questions the prejudices of society based on skin color. Through the publishing market and media, American society reinforces individuals to live up racial stereotypes. Everett not only opposes being labeled “African –American writer” but also protest the racism which obliges the author writing only race-related issues. Erasure makes parody of the criteria’s

Ben Okri writes that “an anomaly of perception is often brought to black and African writers. They tend to be considered only important for their subjects”. He continues by stating that “we read Flaubert for beauty, Joyce for innovation, Virginia Woolf for her poetry, Jane Austen for her psychology. But black and African writers are read for their novels about slavery, colonialism, poverty, civil wars, imprisonment, female circumcision – in short, for subjects that reflect the troubles of Africa and black people as perceived by the rest of the world. They are defined by their subjects”. African American writers are unfairly being dismissed, their works of art being seen only for the content and not for the intellectual word play, brilliant use of literary devices, and any other factor displayed no matter the genius of it. Okri also brings to light that “You could not guess at the difficult lives of the ordinary people from the works of Shakespeare. Nowhere in his plays would you learn that in his time they emptied their lavatory buckets outside their windows and that the streets of Stratford-upon-Avon reeked with rubbish. Yet the works endure. They continue to illuminate the human spirit and awaken us to the strangeness and magnificence of the human estate”. This subject limitation clearly only applies to African American writers. This reality is one that is heavily depicted in the novel by Percival Everett. Monk is told many times that he is “not black enough” and that his writing is not black enough either (Everett, 43). He is told that “this is a business” and that he should compromise who he is in order to sell books and make money (Everett, 43). He is told that the only way to make it as an African American writer is to give the people what they want to