 Hey, everyone. Before we get started today, I just wanted to remind you about our listener survey. It's to find out a little bit more about you, what you like about this podcast, and what you want to see more of. I promise it only takes 10 minutes to fill out, and your feedback will really help us shape this podcast. You can find the survey at Don'tCallMeResilient.com. From the conversation, this is Don't Call Me Resilient. I'm Venetha Srivastava. I'd like to put these things plainly. The privilege and advantage that white people have is that they could have 15 million myriads of representations and images. And the problem when we start putting these up against not just black but other marginalized groups is that it's one or two. Thelonious Ellison, also known as Monk, is a black man. He has dark brown skin, brown eyes, and curly hair. His mother's black, his dad's black, and so are his brother and sister. And on three occasions, he's been detained by the police. But Monk has a problem. He's not considered black enough. If you're wondering who this guy is, he's a character from Percival Everett's novel Erasure. The book has been adapted into a movie called American Fiction, which won the People's Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival this year. American Fiction comes out in theaters this month. The main character, Monk, is a novelist who defies all the pop culture stereotypes of black men. He grew up in a well-respected middle-class household. His father, brother, and sister were all doctors. He graduated from Harvard. He's terrible at basketball. And his last novel was rejected for not appealing to the quote African-American experience. Well, Monk gets pretty fed up with being pigeonholed, and he decides to do the unthinkable. He writes a parody novel as a joke. It's called My Pathology, and it's based on stereotypes of African-American urban communities. Not only is this book that he wrote as a joke well-received by his peers, but it's sold for $600,000, and it's lauded as being a quote authentic portrayal of what it means to be black in America. There are a lot of layers to the story, and here to help me break everything down are two scholars well-versed in Percival Everett's work, as well as conversations around black identities. Vershawn Ashanti Young is the director of Black Studies and a professor in the Department of Communication, Arts, and English Language, and Literature at the University of Waterloo. He also goes by Dr. Vey. An Anthony Stewart is a professor in the English Department at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. He has written extensively about the works of Percival Everett. Welcome to you both. Thank you. Thank you for having us. So at the beginning of the novel, the main character, Monk, says, the hard, gritty truth of the matter is that I hardly ever think about race. Those times when I did think about it a lot, I did so because of my guilt for not thinking about it. Vershawn, if we can start with you, I'm wondering if you relate to Monk, and also if you want to unpack that quote a little bit for us. First of all, I do not relate to Monk. I think that I might be the exact antithesis of Monk, personally. I think the dilemma is somewhat manufactured, to be honest. I'm not saying that the situation about race and racial stereotypes and thinking about race and the impositions on black people are not real. I'm not saying that at all, but what I'm saying is the way in which he characterizes it seems to me to be unreliable. When he says that he doesn't think about race, the whole book is about his thinking about race. He begins by talking about race. We find him, as you just said, opining about race and wants us to believe something that we never actually see in the text. He is always thinking about it and consumed in it and responding to it and acting upon ideas, representations of race. Let's hear from Anthony. What is your interpretation of this? Vershawn, I know what you mean. In a lot of ways, I agree with what you said. The part I disagree with is it's a very specific application of a very general problem. He's a writer. His big problem is a problem that almost nobody runs into, which is not being able to get people to buy your work because of a specific evaluative problem. The fact that black people in the United States and specifically black men are fetishized in a lot of ways on other people's terms. How we all end up dealing with that or interacting with that, it's the equivalent of the irony of being American. What happens in the United States is Americans spend a lot of time criticizing each other for their inability to talk about race, but also their inability to talk about anything except race. The idea that Monk, as Vershawn rightly points out, says that he's not talking about race and the whole book is about race, the argument could be made that's about as American as anything anybody writes. Even when Americans aren't talking about race, they're talking about race. The Great Gatsby is not about race. Nick Caraway doesn't have to tell anybody at the beginning of the book that he's white, but he does make reference to the three black people that he sees in the car driving over the bridge. He mentions that they're Negroes, a book written in the 20s, and he mentions the pale, well-dressed Negro who sees the car accident near the end of the book. He doesn't say that the police officer is black, so we assume that police officer is white. What happens in a lot of Everett's work is that set of assumptions that says in American art or characters white until we're told otherwise, I think Monk really puts a point on that by drawing attention both to his blackness and his apparent unwillingness to talk about his blackness when basically, as Vershawn says, all he talks about is race. I guess that's the whole idea of the book itself, the concept of this book is the critique of the industry that puts him in that position. It's a critique on the literary industry and how it, as you say, pigeonholes people based on race, so if you read a character and it doesn't say what race you are, then that character is assumed to be white. But isn't that critique an accurate critique of the literary industry today? The funny thing is, yes, it is, to me, the irony of erasure is that erasure is in fact a critique of the American literary industry or the publishing industry. Yet at the same time, for a long time, it was his most popular book. I was talking to somebody yesterday about the movie, and this person's actually been to a premiere and seen the movie, and there were a lot of film industry people in the audience and seemingly unwittingly laughing at the representations of film industry people who are basically representations of themselves, and they don't really know that. Yeah. And a lot of the time with Everett's work, you sometimes find yourself thinking, maybe there's a joke going on, and maybe I'm actually the butt of the joke. Is this movie about me? Right. And the book, too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ve, you wanted to say something about this. I was going to pick up on your question in a different sort of way, and is it a critique of the publishing industry and the media industry? Yeah. First of all, let me say, when I saw the clip of the movie, I was like, I'm so excited. I can't wait to see it. I'm not privileged enough to go to a premiere, but I am really eager to see this movie. Yeah. I was in graduate school when this book came out, and I was in the bookstore looking for tax to teach, and I was teaching a literature class, and I taught that book. It was about 2000, I guess, that came out. Turn of the Century. 2001. 2001. Yeah. And I look at, his book was published in 2001. It's 2023. It's now becoming a movie, but when we put that up against something like Catherine Stockett's The Help, which was published around 2013 to 2014, and immediately became a movie. Right. Like immediately. And they do something similar, although Stockett tries to do it with sincerity. Everett is doing it with parody and putting it in your face. The use of black English in these two texts is completely and utterly incorrect. So Stockett thinks that she's writing in black English. She's not. Right. Linguists have, that have studied this book and have written about it, said like black speakers don't speak that way. Black speakers of black English. In Everett's book, he's also deliberately writing in a kind of really ridiculous version of black English, when like that famous clip in the trailer, where the author that's on the full Oprah Winfrey show. Yeah, played by Issa Rae, right? The author. Yes. How did you come to write this book? What really struck me was that too few books were about my people. Where are our stories? Where is our representation? As she begins the opening line is I'd be pregnant again. And if Ray's going to be the father of something like that, would you give us the pleasure of reading an excerpt? Yo, Sharanda, girl, you be pregnant again. If I is Ray Ray is going to be a real father this time around, which is not a correct sense of black English. But my point here is to say the stereotypes that we're talking about when we put this book up against something like stock is to help, we really get to see that it is an appeal to white people just to put it plainly. Right. Not an appeal to blacks. I think Monk, the writer, the character in the novel is, when he does it, is angry, is upset. Obviously, he's frustrated that he is a writer. His works, which are more, I don't know, Western classical high intellectual novels don't sell. And so he creates this very stereotypical ghetto thug that's hypermasculine. He's promiscuous. But he also has the other characters in here of black men. Monk's brother is a gay man, for example, and he doesn't feel quote man enough. I'm wondering what you think the author's message is for us with these varied characters. I don't think we get to see enough about the brother in the book. I thought the brother was such a minor character in the erasure that upon first reading, I thought that there could be much more here. And I think if this, I want to see the movie version because maybe it's amplified because our culture has changed in a lot of ways in terms of queerness and sexualities and things like that. Some of the dilemmas or problems of the discourse at the time, we've not made huge strides with some. I think that he could have done more with the character and his sexuality. The inner book, the My Pathology, is obviously a parody of Richard Wright's Native Son. And the protagonist's bigger is from the ghetto, hypermasculine as well. But we don't get to see a lot of his sexuality. You know, James Baldwin has a famous quote that there's violence where sex should be, right, in Richard Wright's Native Son. I think what you said also is very interesting. It's a 20-year-old novel. And things I do think have changed, especially around queer liberation and queer movements. And so one would hope that had he written that today, that that character would be a little bit more fulfilled out. Anthony, what do you think about the author's message for us with these two characters? If the film or the book did more with queerness, it's difficult for me not to imagine a way for that to be fetishized, certainly by the culture and especially by the movie. So I don't think I trust the culture to render really any form of identity that does not cleave to the mainstream with any sort of complexity. I say all the time to people that there are a few things that the United States exports more than images of blackness in different ways. But usually those images of blackness are run through a filter of commerce that is almost exclusively or primarily benefits white commercial interest. A lot of what I was required to read as an English student over the course of all of my education was quite explicitly not intended for me. And so what I was required to do was I was supposed to, as a reader, as a black reader, I'm supposed to fit my humanity to a model that is designed to exclude me. I was actually surprised, happy to be honest, to see this be made into a film, but surprised that at this cultural moment, it's actually being made into a film and being released. Because we're actually in a cultural moment where saying almost anything about race is extremely terrifying for a lot of people, even people like myself who work on race as particularly blackness. Also, as I think we're mentioning with the gay brother, it's deeply about class. It's about racialized class. And those are things that we're not having those conversations right now. We can't have them. We can't intersect them into political conversations at the moment in North America in general, Canada and the US. So the fact that the movies coming out gives us an opportunity to have the chat because people talk about movies get reviewed, they get talked about. The other thing I wanted to say about is that it also helps us to see how expansive the title erasure is. Who actually is under erasure? Who is putting people under erasure? I would say that we tend to bifurcate or separate in our cultural discourse that the gay queer person, black gay queer person, cannot also be a black ghetto or thug person. Corey Jefferson wrote this because what he was seeing as a journalist was over and over again being called upon to write about black tragedies, but also this idea of leaning on these tropes or these stereotypes of black folks over and over again. And I'm wondering, Vershan, why are black stereotypes so persistent? Economics. That's what I would say. But I want to point something out about this conversation with Anthony. So Anthony is Canadian and lives in the US and teaches and works in the US. Yeah. I was thinking about this. Right. And I'm an American, right? In Canada. Yeah. Teaching and living in Canada. And I think that it's, that Jackson's position is really interesting to me because I, although American, I bring this American sensibility to this conversation, but I am around Canadian discourse about these topics. And Canadian discourse, what's really interesting that I'm finding is that the conversation is not mature. I was wondering what euphemism you were going to go to there. That was nice. That was nice. And that's on the race issue, right? Including everybody. But the other thing that's really interesting is the way this conversation gets taken up among black people in Canada. And it's a little troubling to me, I must say, because the conversation about black representation of stereotypes and blackness tends, among the black colleagues and people that I have conversations with, tend to exclude blacks in the US about American blacks. There's a pitting against islanders, Caribbean's, Africans in Canada and black US people. Yes. As if we're not, and I'm saying, wait, because I'm American, part of the diaspora. We're all a part of the diaspora. It really makes me like, why is it that we're doing the work of, for lack of a better term, the man among ourselves, whether we're in Canada or the US? Why are we doing this work? We all have experienced this forced diaspora that still affects us all. I think black people in Canada can do more to talk about these sort of things and how it relates in this particular cultural context, as opposed to appealing to a Canadian identity, which my colleagues tend to do. I'm glad it isn't just me, Versha, on the one thing I would correct you. And on some level, it makes your point. When I tell people where I'm from, I tell people I was born in Canada. I never identify as Canadian because I never felt Canadian when I lived in Canada. And I think part of what you're getting at is, I think a lot of the black, specifically a lot of the black academics that you would know are like me or like my parents, right? They're either immigrants to Canada themselves or the children of immigrants like me. And so my relationship to the United States is very similar, I think, to your relationship to Canada in that your claims on this country are different because you're not in quotation marks from there in the same way that my claims on the United States are different because I'm not from here. One of the things that I'm always struck by with respect to black Americans that I know is they're very strong sense. And in a lot of ways, they're very complicated sense of being American, of being, in some cases, proud of being American. And whereas in Canada, I think the way I put it is Canada basically has one story it tells itself about itself. It's all that stuff about open-mindedness and tolerance and Canadians being polite and all that other business. And so there's a lot of pressure in Canada to fit yourself to that one story. Whereas the United States has more stories that it tells about itself than you can keep track of. And what Americans fight about more than anything else is who is American, who isn't, who gets to be American and who doesn't. And to get back to your original question about the persistence of, well, let's just call it racism and white supremacy and how it manifests itself in the culture, I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that it changes over time. There's a great line from a James Bond movie where somebody is trying to hack into a system and he says it's like trying to solve a Rubik's Cube that's fighting back. It just keeps morphing. It gets smarter and it appropriates what you do and hits it back at you. Yeah. But then a black man becomes president of the United States. And I think on some level, the most recent sort of and the most virulent duration of all of this, the sort of the backlash and to Vershawn's earlier point about how difficult all of this is now. A lot of that I think has to do with the fact that now we're at a point where the sort of the final frontier to put it one way of white American power has been breached. You go back through the history and the sort of the last bastion was presidents of the United States. Now that that has been changed for the first time, if you're a white person living in the United States for the first time, you have to think about the possibility that just being white isn't enough anymore. What you see as a result is you see the backlash in terms of the last president, but you also see the kind of things that people are willing to say out loud now that they weren't willing to say out loud. They were thinking them, but they weren't willing to say them out loud. They certainly weren't willing to say them on television. Vershawn, what I'm wondering is do you think that this novels like this and movies like American fiction and novels like Erasure can help us disrupt or can help us think about disrupting this power? I do. I really do. In subversive ways, they're not direct. I think every little bit helps. Let me give you an example. The NAACP was against Amos and Andy because they said that it perpetuated stereotypes about the Black Sambo and minstrel sea among blacks. But at the same time, black people were on TV. We need to have a wide range of images. And once we are able to see a wide range of images and perspectives without saying pitting them against each other, I think that is the movement. So I'm not against a novel like Erasure. I'm not against a novel like Native Son. I'm not even against Catherine Starkas to help. Although I think it could have been better done and some other serious things could happen. But what I'm saying here is what we were talking about race. And I'd like to put these things plainly. The privilege and advantage that white people have is that they could have 15 million myriads of representations and images. And the problem when we start putting these up against not just black but other marginalized groups is that it's one or two. And this is what I was saying earlier about my problem with Everett in this book, not that I'm criticizing it and being negative about it, but he's falling into the same problem of pitting one image of blackness against another and trying to make that the problem. That's why I said it's a false dilemma. The dilemma is the restriction and reduction of the possibilities of what it means to be black. And it's not one, two, or three. It is like 15 million. We're not like the protagonist in my pathology only. We're not like Percival Everett. Those are just two. And so that's why I was saying I think the problem is bigger. So it gives us an opportunity to talk to have this conversation. It gives us an opportunity to say, hey, the black ghetto guy isn't the paradigm only of blackness. And instead of having them to identify only with white culture, that is a form and representation of blackness. But we don't get to see all of these because we have reduced this conversation. We reduced these stereotypes, unfortunately, for a lack of investment in real, multifarious representations. And all I would add is that the book makes this point, right? Because it's not that there's only one or two representations of blackness. It's that only one or two representations of blackness is saleable. Yes. Remember, he's written all these other books and he keeps being told that they're not black enough. He writes this book basically as a sort of a temper tantrum and it ends up making a lot of money for him because to use the old expression that's giving the people what they want, right? Yeah. But the question is who are the people when you're giving the people what they want. And so what my pathology represents, as much as anything else is that kind of reducing streamlining stereotyping mechanism of the culture, Vershawn, that you're talking about, right? It doesn't happen by accident. It doesn't happen on its own. These things happen as a result of very specific decisions that people make. When Don DeLillo writes a novel, he's not responsible for representing the sensibility of white America, right? And if anybody were to write that in a review, it wouldn't get published because it would be so beside the point. It would be so ridiculous, right? And when I say it, you can hear how ridiculous it sounds. That is one of the best explanations that I've heard about what's actually going on in that novel with representation. I appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much. I saw like Vershawn just nodding his head. Can I ask Anthony one other question? So, Anthony, at the end of the novel, I really don't get the ending. It's an invisible man, Elisonian ending, right? Like he... Sure. What happens there? Just in the novel, if you could just... On some basic level, the book isn't about resolving the problem. The book is not about concluding. People criticize his work a lot for a lot of his novels just stop. They don't really end. They don't conclude. They just stop. And I think one of the reasons for that, or at least one of the things that I make sense of out of that, is that the novels are not discourses. They're not arguments. They're really quite intentionally works of fiction, right? One of the things that I've written about his work is that his work is not the kind of work that you're supposed to, in quotation marks, lose yourself in, right? There are all kinds of ways over the course of his books that intentionally remind you that you are reading. Because in a weird way, if you get absorbed into the fictional language or the fictional world of a novel, you're not really evaluating or thinking anymore. And so in those long sort of 19th century novels where you absorb yourself into a world, we spend a lot of time talking about that kind of world as realism, when in fact it's the exact opposite of realism. Because when Dickens, you know what every character is doing and thinking all the time, that's not the way the world works. That's not realism at all. But that's what we call it. By contrast, what you get in Everett, and this gets all the way back, Vershan, to what you said at the beginning about Monk being unreliable, of course he is, but all narrators are, right? Because everything that gets written, one of the first things that everybody who writes anything knows, is that there's stuff that they left out. How would this book, how would this article, how would this essay, how would this speech, how would this eulogy be different if some of the stuff that I had brought in, I had left out and vice versa. We always make these decisions. And I think that's the way stereotyping works. Stereotyping works on a reductive notion. All people who are X are like this. And so that's what the bigot does. Because the bigot wants to make the world small and predictable. Whatever its work does is it makes the world big and unpredictable. What my frustration is that a lot of the sort of the commercial impulses that we've talked about, the aesthetic and evaluative impulses that we've talked about, they work to reduce what is best about language and what is best about art. This book is 20 years old and it's now being given new life in this film. So that must give you tremendous hope as well. Yeah, it's hopeful. But I am ambivalent about seeing the movie. I persist in that. It took too long though, Vanita. For me, it took too long. This should have been made into a movie a long time ago. I think it's a double-edged sword. Yes, it's hopeful. But this should have been, as I was saying earlier, if Katherine Stockett's movie could have been made into a movie a year after it was, on the best-seller list, this could have been made into a movie at the turn of the century. We weren't perhaps, the film industry wasn't perhaps ready for it. There was no court Jefferson quite ready. There was nobody to step in. We needed perhaps court Jefferson to be the person to take it up, pick it up, read it and say, I relate to this. This has to be made. I think he personally related to that idea of needing to choose this or that or, as you say, you only got these three boxes that you're allowed to be in. Thank you both very much for being here today. I really appreciate it. Thank you for having us. It was a pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to this episode of Don't Call Me Resilient. This one is our last for the season. I believe that we could have gone on talking about American fiction and erasure for at least another hour, but why don't you let us know what you think after you see the movie? You can reach me at dcmr at theconversation.com. And if you haven't already, give us a follow on Instagram at Don't Call Me Resilient podcast. Don't Call Me Resilient is a production of The Conversation Canada. It was made possible by a grant for journalism innovation from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The series is produced and hosted by me beneath the Srivastava. Our associate producers are Atika Kaki and Danielle Piper. Our consulting producer is Jennifer Morose. Rematula Shake does our sound design and mixing. Kika Chimeme is our student producer and Scott White is the CEO of The Conversation Canada. And if you're wondering who wrote and performed the music we use on the podcast, that's Zaki Ibrahim. The track is called Something in the Water. Baby, there's something in the water. Baby, there's something out in the way.