Grace Glagola

ENG 282

25 April 2017

Erasure Critical Summary; Dont Judge a Book By Its Cover

Big bookstore chains like Barnes and Noble all fall prey to the same hideous stereotyping

that has been going on for centuries. These chains take works of literature by African American

authors and tuck their stories away in the African American Literature section in their stores,

when many of them do not even relate to their ethnicity. The scene I chose in Percival Everetts

novel Erasure, is when Monk Ellison takes a trip to Borders, where he encounters firsthand his

books being stuffed away in the African American Literature section, when they have nothing

to do with being black.

This scene in Erasure piqued my interest because I never really thought of the

potentially harmful qualities that categorizing and stereotyping books could have. I always

assumed that wherever a book remained on the shelves was where it was supposed to be- and

what it was actually about. Everett shows his readers through the eyes of the writer Ellisons

journey to Borders that even books are being racially biased against. Ellison upon his travels to

see his own books in the store recalls, I went to Literature and did not see me. I went to

Contemporary Fiction and did not find me, but when I fell back a couple of steps I found a

section called African American Studies and there, arranged alphabetically and neatly, read

undisturbed, were four of my books including my Persians of which the only thing ostensibly

African American was my jacket photograph. I became quickly irate, my pulse speeding up, my

brow furrowing. Someone interested in African American Studies would have little interest in my
books and would be confused by their presence in the section. Someone looking for an obscure

reworking of a Greek tragedy would not consider looking in that section any more than the

gardening section. The result in either case, no sale. That fucking store was taking food from my

table (Everett 38). It is absolutely disgusting that we are even racially stereotyping books based

on the race of the author. Dont judge a book by its cover should have more meaning to the store

owners.

The clear message that goes beyond the scene is that there seems to be an innate sense of

racism within most of the American population. Through that racism, they are unable to

distinguish between the topic of the novel, and the race of the author (if it is not white). Anything

that is done by a person of color is immediately camouflaged into a generalized sense of what

stereotypical novels by similar authors have done, regardless of what the work is actually about.

Camouflaging works and erasing the meaning inside of the novels definitely relates to

Passing by Nella Larsen. In Passing, Clare and Irene have chosen to live their lives as an

ambiguous race, both of which are African American of some sort, but they choose to be white in

order to have an easier life. By the end of the novel, Clare and Irene struggle with the people

they have become, due to their own erasure of their true identity. These bookstores like Barnes

and Noble hide the books away into unrelated sections, much like how Clare and Irene hide

away their true identity. It is easier for both Barnes and Noble, and Clare and Irene in that way.

The novel Erasure enlivened my understanding of African American literature through

experiencing another view on Black Art, and a parody of Black Art. In Erasure, Ellison is

completely against what Black Art stands for, and he hates how easily authors profit from it. He

writes his own rendition of Black Art, which ends up being published under the title Fuck, and

wins an award at the end of the novel. The injustices that African American authors have to deal
with on a daily basis through the innate racism rooted within big chain bookstores may not have

been the biggest part of Erasure, but it certainly made me wonder about my own Barnes and

Noble.

Works Cited

Everett, Percival L. Erasure: a Novel. Minneapolis, MN, Graywolf Press, 2011.

Larsen, Nella. Passing. New York, BN Publishing, 2012.