Racial Profiling In Thelonious Monk

“The line is, you’re not black enough,” exclaims the literary agent, Yul, to the main character and protagonist, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Everett 43). Monk is reeling as he learns the latest of his novels is amongst a stack of recent rejections. This proclamation marks the writer's seventeenth rejection by publishing companies. Monk is a novelist and professor of English literature, much like his creator, the author, poet, and novelist Percival Everett. Monk prides his literary writings of rather obscure papers and does not see them, nor any of his works, as works of color. The professor describes himself as a man of many different interests, most of which are scholarly and academic in nature. Monk also goes on with his self-description to emphasize the things he is not capable of doing to point out that, regardless of whatever label society may thrust upon him, he does meet any stereotypical racial definition, nor is he desirous of doing so! Monk does not like labels nor does he see the purpose of cultural labels …show more content…
The kind of practice is not new to the literary world of publishing executives and, unfortunately, has been around for generations. It is an ugly practice which provokes a further investigation into its negative impact on both the identity of the writer and of society’s right to find books on a shelf according to a book's content, as opposed to the skin color, race or gender affiliation of an author. Everett’s 2001 novel, Erasure, establishes the need for mainstream media and publishing executives to put an end to the attempts of reinventing authorial identity --forcing a change of a writer's genre of preference-- based on the racial, gender, and cultural expectations of money-hungry publishing companies being fed by a misguided