Percival Everett's Erasure Percival Everett’s novel, Erasure, was published in 2001, in a 21st century that is far removed—if only temporally—from the abolitionist movement, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow laws. The representations of African-Americans that were ubiquitous during those times, such as Sambos, Zip Coons, and Mammies, are now tangible only as collector’s antiques. While these specific representations of African-Americans may no longer be prevalent in American society, the form of racism that they embodied remains. Although the representations may have changed, American society’s insistence on maintaining such a narrow representation of black life has not. Everett has written Erasure to expose and combat this racism with his protagonist Thelonius “Monk” Ellison. Monk’s experiences and commentary expose how eager in our society is to reinforce a single representation of black life, yet Monk undermines this representation by being its antithesis, and by emphasizing his experiences that are not exceptional but universal and transcendent of race. Monk begins to articulate exactly what this representation is from the first page of the novel. In the second entry of his journal, Monk provides a description of himself, and in doing so, he emphasizes all of the ways in which he does not fit with what may inevitably be the reader’s expectation once he reveals that he is black. “Though I am fairly athletic, I am no good at basketball… I graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, hating every minute of it. I am good at math. I cannot dance. I did not grow up in any inner city or the rural south” (Everett 1). The brief sentences add emphasis to the carefully selected and peculiar details such as that he is not good at bas... ... middle of paper ... ...’s portrayal can serve only to break down the stereotype that exists in the reader’s mind. By including this portion of the novel, Everett has answered Hurston’s call and discreetly undermined the racial stereotype that is such a prevalent form of racism in American society. American society has made large strides since the days of slavery and Jim Crow laws, and yet, as Erasure reminds us, it still has a long way to go. Van Go Jenkins dolls may not be found in any American households and Sharonda may not be the new face of maple syrup, yet these characters’ parallels with the Sambos and Mammies of America’s past are strikingly clear. Percival Everett has crafted his novel not only to expose these 21st century representations of African-American life, but to undermine them and demonstrate that they are just as fictional and repulsive as the Sambos of old.
In order to illustrate the segregation of African-American, Lowe uses representation in her work. The characters in the story represent a social status based on race: the owners, Mr. Parsons and Kraft, represent the high-class and Mrs. Jackson represents the low-class. First, let’s discuss how Lowe shows the audience that Mr. Parsons and Kraft represent the high-class. For instance, the narrator frequently refers to Mr. Parsons and Kraft as “the proprietor” (Lowe 2) but always refers to Mrs. Jackson as herself. By using the word “proprietor” instead of their names, Lowe shows a separation between Mrs. Jackson and Mr. Parsons and Kraft. This use of word declares that the owners are a representation of high-class. They are different...
Both memoirs—John Griffin’s Black Like Me and Dick Gregory’s Nigger—examine race marginalization as it existed in mid-twentieth century America. Griffin’s Black Like Me intimately explores the discrimination against the black community by whites to expose the “truth” of racial relations and to “bridge the gap” of communication and understanding between the two races through a “social experiment”—an assumption of alterity (Griffin 1). In Nigger, Gregory also recounts personal racial discrimination as a black man trying to survive and succeed in a discriminatory society. But unlike Griffin’s experience, Gregory’s memoir progresses from a position of repressed “Other” to a more realized, dominant identity. However, the existence of a dual persona
No matter where one is from or where one finds themselves today, we carry with us in some way or another a specific heritage. Certain events and circumstances can lead to someone trying to forget their heritage or doing everything in their power to preserve that heritage. Alice Walker’s “EveryDay Use” was published in 1973, not long after the civil rights movement, and reflects the struggles of dealing with a heritage that one might not want to remember (Shmoop). Alice Walker is well known as a civil rights and women’s rights activist. Like many of her other works she uses “Everyday Use” to express her feelings on a subject; in this case African American heritage. Through “Everyday Use” it can be seen that Alice Walker has negative feelings about how many African Americans were trying to remove themselves from parts of their African American culture during the time of the short story’s publishment. This idea that Walker was opposed to this “deracinating” of African Americans coming out of the civil rights
Although an effort is made in connecting with the blacks, the idea behind it is not in understanding the blacks and their culture but rather is an exploitative one. It had an adverse impact on the black community by degrading their esteem and status in the community. For many years, the political process also had been influenced by the same ideas and had ignored the black population in the political process (Belk, 1990). America loves appropriating black culture — even when black people themselves, at times, don’t receive much love from America.
Hurston begins the essay in her birth town: Eatonville, Florida; an exclusively Negro town where whites were a rarity, only occasionally passing by as a tourist. Hurston, sitting on her porch imagines it to be a theatre as she narrates her perspective of the passing white people. She finds a thin line separating the spectator from the viewer. Exchanging stances at will and whim. Her front porch becomes a metaphor for a theater seat and the passers
The African-American Years: Chronologies of American History and Experience. Ed. Gabriel Burns Stepto. New York: Charles Scribner 's Sons, 2003.
In today’s age, African-Americans are still viewed as the lower race. There are entire ghettos associated with housing only African-American individuals and cities are divided among racial lines. For example, our hometown of Chicago, the north serves as residence to the “whites” while the south end of the city home to “blacks”. There is a wide-spread belief that African-Americans are not as smart as the rest of the population, are in some way related to a criminal background, and/or do not care about their betterment in any way and are lazy. This is because, Mills argues, racial realists associate racial characteristics to the “peculiar” history of that race. This makes argument makes logical sense given the oppressive history of African-Americans in
Williams, A. N. (2006). OUR KIND OF PEOPLE: SOCIAL STATUS AND CLASS AWARENESS IN POST-RECONSTRUCTION AFRICAN AMERICAN FICTION. Retrieved December 1, 2013, from https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/indexablecontent?id=uuid:c9d7fd9d-c5df-4dea-aa22-35820de5878e&ds=DATA_FILE
In the short story “Everyday Use,” Alice Walker explored the results of the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation in African American society during the early 1900s. The “Reconstruction Era” marked a time when the United States, especially African American sects, sought to start over again from the aftermath (PBS, 2004). In the allegorical short story, Dee, or “Wangero,” watches the old family dwelling burn until the last dingy gray board lay in ruin--she showed relief (Walker, 1337).
Hurston does not concern herself with the actions of whites. Instead, she concerns herself with the self-perceptions and actions of blacks. Whites become almost irrelevant, certainly negative, but in no way absolute influences on her
Today, blacks are respected very differently in society than they used to be. In “The Help”, we see a shift in focus between what life is like now for the average African American compared to what it was like for them to live in the 1960’s.“The Help” teaches readers the importance of understanding and learning from our history. The novel is a snapshot of the cultural, racial and economic distinctions between blacks and whites in a particularly tumultuous time in American history. “The Help” encourages readers to examine personal prejudices and to strive to foster global equality.
I would not say that categories are always bad, because they help us to understand the world, but they can become dangerous when they produce stereotypes and prejudices. The good thing about Erasure is that not only the views of American society towards African Americans are discussed, but also the way African Americans see themselves, and how they add to the common stereotypes. This book targets everyone who is interested in how racism and prejudices are produced, and how they are maintained, because this novel grants the reader some very interesting perspectives in the subject. Furthermore, everyone who likes to read a good story will have his/her pleasure with the novel called
In the article, “A Letter My Son,” Ta-Nehisi Coates utilizes both ethical and pathetic appeal to address his audience in a personable manner. The purpose of this article is to enlighten the audience, and in particular his son, on what it looks like, feels like, and means to be encompassed in his black body through a series of personal anecdotes and self-reflection on what it means to be black. In comparison, Coates goes a step further and analyzes how a black body moves and is perceived in a world that is centered on whiteness. This is established in the first half of the text when the author states that,“white America’s progress, or rather the progress of those Americans who believe that they are white, was built on looting and violence,”
In this narrative essay, Brent Staples provides a personal account of his experiences as a black man in modern society. “Black Men and Public Space” acts as a journey for the readers to follow as Staples discovers the many societal biases against him, simply because of his skin color. The essay begins when Staples was twenty-two years old, walking the streets of Chicago late in the evening, and a woman responds to his presence with fear. Being a larger black man, he learned that he would be stereotyped by others around him as a “mugger, rapist, or worse” (135).
In “Everyday Use”, Alice Walker is exploring the concept of heritage as it applies to African-Americans. It appears to be set in the late ‘60s or early ‘70s. This was the time when African-Americans were struggling to define their personal identities. Many blacks who had stories of pain and injustice wanted to rediscover their African roots, and they were denying their American heritage to do so. In “Everyday Use,” Alice Walker argues that an African-American is both African and American.