Dissociative Identity Politics

What 'American Fiction,' 'Victim,' and 'Erasure' have to say about the evolution of identity politics culture

I’m proud to say I never posted a black square on June 2^nd, 2020, when Instagrammers were encouraged to post that in remembrance of George Floyd. The bullshittiness was apparent from the get-go. But I wasn’t completely immune from wanting to be counted on social media among those on the just side of history during that time. I did post a photo of a hard hat on which I’d written all the names of the many black men and women who’d been killed by the police in the last decade or so.

I’d bought that hard hat after going to a George Floyd protest in Fort Greene, Brooklyn on May 29^th, 2020. I’d been to protests before, but they were just glorified music festivals and parades. On that night, however, there was tear gas, frantically retreating crowds, and baton beatings. To be better prepared next time, I also bought goggles, in addition to the hard hat. They proved to be overkill, though. In about a week’s time, the protests in the city returned to their usual parade-like feel, at least the ones I went to.

But from that May 29^th protest, there’s a story that continues to haunt me. It’s the one about the two lawyers who threw a Molotov cocktail at an empty police car. We are of similar age, education, career paths, and general political sympathies. We were all swept up in that moment, too. But with them, much more so. By early 2023, both had been sentenced to prison terms.

I’ve wondered what must’ve gone on in their minds that night. They must’ve known they were doing something rather extreme, but they also must’ve justified it as also something bold and noble and necessary, so much so that their friends and supporters would have their backs. Maybe they’d even go down as lauded historical figures.

Now we’re in 2024, and we’ve become disillusioned with social justice. Or at least with the 2020ish iteration of it. Even the Daily Show trots out Charlamagne to talk about how DEI is kind of nonsense. I’ve long joked with my friends that DEI events are actually covert ops by white supremacists, designed to irritate moderates, liberals, and leftists into hating the ideals of diversity and social justice. This wasn’t what those lawyers threw that Molotov cocktail for. It’s a dreadful thought, to have thrown your life away upon the altar of corporate PR jobs (and bad streaming shows), most of which are disappearing anyway.

It’s all part of a broader non-conservative disavowal of this strain of social justice. I’ve previously written about some novels and non-fiction books that do this. This time, the movie American Fiction (based on Percival Everett’s Erasure) and Andrew Boryga’s new novel, Victim, warrant a closer look as examples of where our ideas of identity and justice might be headed from here.

Unfortunately, American Fiction is a contemptible fraud of a movie.¹ Its savviness is its most admirable trait. It’s clever enough to know that the mid-2020s is not like the Trump years or the Summer of 2020, so it deftly pivots to protect the lucky few who’ve gained the most in the era we’re leaving behind.

In the movie, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison is a struggling black novelist who contemptuously (and pseudonymously, as Stagg R. Leigh) writes an outrageously stereotypical black novel, My Pafology, out of frustration at how such books do so well. In Erasure, the author of that rival book (We’s Lives In Da Ghetto) is named Juanita Mae Jenkins, while in American Fiction, she is rechristened as Sintara Golden. Much to Monk’s shock, a huge bidding war breaks out for his new book, and because he needs the money to take care of his ailing mother, he takes the deal and assumes double identities.

Had the film faithfully adapted Everett’s novel, it would’ve likely been serviceable, a job done for a novice director who once proudly said he’d delegate all the “technical stuff” of filmmaking to underlings. But the problem for American Fiction is that Erasure was published in 2001, which made its critique of America’s gleeful pop-culture revelry in depictions of impoverished black misery—e.g. Push (published in 1996), gangsta rap, and The Maury Povich Show—timely and relevant.

But an uncomfortable fact for American Fiction and its class of creators is that in these times, they themselves have become the favoured representatives of the black experience for the rest of America to consume. To accurately update Erasure, it wouldn’t be a We’s Lives In Da Ghetto that gets fast-tracked to success by the industry. Instead, it would look something more like Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The crack epidemic and drive-by shootings would be replaced by the angst of not feeling 100% welcome at an Ivy League university or the mildly uncomfortable moments that pop up when dating a white person. The meanest thing I can say about this type of black culture is that it’s becoming very similar to (elite) Asian American culture.

So how does American Fiction confront this? Does it bravely engage in shrewd self-examination? Of course not. It preserves the idea of the novel, forcing the audience to suspend its disbelief in pretending that Boyz n the Hood, Precious, and Suge Knight still predominantly represent black culture to the rest of America. But when’s the last time a major so-called black ghetto novel was published, or its movie equivalent released? Recently, I was in a bookstore and stumbled upon a novel titled Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead. Here’s the plot summary:

Benji Cooper is one of the few Black students at an elite prep school in Manhattan. But every summer, Benji escapes to the Hamptons, to Sag Harbor, where a small community of Black professionals have built a world of their own.
 
The summer of ’85 won’t be without its usual trials and tribulations, of course. There will be complicated new handshakes to fumble through and state-of-the-art profanity to master. Benji will be tested by contests big and small, by his misshapen haircut (which seems to have a will of its own), by the New Coke Tragedy, and by his secret Lite FM addiction. But maybe, just maybe, this summer might be one for the ages.

And this book was published in 2009. Many more have come since. A movie like 12 Years A Slave came out in 2013 to sky-high acclaim, but few have followed in its footsteps. There was Harriet (2019), but it was almost more of a comic book movie than a slavery movie. And there was Antebellum (2020), but that was a historical movie in the same way The Village was a historical movie.

It’s likely no coincidence that Sintara Golden is played by Issa Rae, one of the leading figures of this new black culture. The name change itself is suspicious. They didn’t change Monk’s name, so why change Jenkins’ name? My guess is that “Juanita Mae Jenkins” sounds too country and unsophisticated. It doesn’t sound like “Cord Jefferson” or “Issa Rae.” And they need Sintara (f/k/a Juanita) to seem like them because she’s their avatar in the film, skewering Monk with a perfect riposte when he calls them out.

Monk: Okay so, and please, don’t take offense at this, but how is [My Pafology] so very different from your book?

Sintara: Is that what this is about? You think my book is trash?

M: No, to be honest, I haven’t read your book. I’ve read excerpts. And it didn’t seem so dissimilar.

S: I did a lot of research for my book. Some of it was actually taken from real interviews. Maybe you’ve been up in your ivory tower of academia for so long you’ve forgotten that some people’s lives are hard.

M: Your life? You went to an exclusive bohemian college. You had a job at a fancy publishing house in New York.

S: So what? I don’t have to write about my life. I write about what interests people.

M: You write about what interests white publishers fiending black trauma porn.

S: They’re the ones buying the manuscripts. Is it bad to cater to their tastes?

M: If you’re okay feeding people’s base desires for profit.

S: I’m okay with giving the market what it wants.

M: That’s how drug dealers excuse themselves.

S: And I think drugs should be legal.

M: But you’re not fed up with it? Black people in poverty. Black people rapping. Black people as slaves. Black people murdered by the police. Whole soaring narratives about black folks in dire circumstances who still manage to maintain their dignity before they die. I mean, I’m not saying these things aren’t real. But we’re also more than this. It’s like so many writers like you can’t envision us without some white boot on our necks.

S: Do you get angry at Bret Easton Ellis or Charles Bukowski for writing about the downtrodden? Or is your ire strictly reserved for black women?

M: But nobody reads Bukowski thinking his is the definitive white experience. But white people read your book and confine us to “it.” They think we’re all like that.

S: Then it sounds like your issue is with white people, Monk, not me.

M: Maybe. But I also think I see the unrealized potential of black people in this country.

S: Potential is what people see when they think what they see in front of them is good enough.

Even just taken at face value, this exchange is incoherent. Firstly, to say that Bret Easton Ellis writes about the “downtrodden” only makes sense if rich beautiful white people who do too many drugs and have too much sex have suddenly become the new morlocks. Furthermore, while Ellis and Bukowski did write about unsavoury people of their own race, both are also from the class they wrote about, unlike Sintara. Secondly, Sintara goes from admitting that her work caters to white tastes fiending for black trauma porn, to then acting as if her work is actually genuinely representative of black people, and that by objecting to her novel, Monk is somehow a snobby self-hater. Thirdly, Monk was previously trashing My Pafology, which was written by a black man, so Sintara has no ground to stand on to accuse him of only going after black women.

Sintara’s jab about Monk’s supposed misogyny (to which he doesn’t even offer a rebuttal) is a telling giveaway. American Fiction’s curse is that it was made when many groups like black women, black gays and lesbians, black trans people have climbed in influence as representatives of black people, especially in industries like literature. To attack the favoured black narratives in 2023 (as opposed to 2001, like Erasure did) would be to attack the narratives of these groups. That is something American Fiction does not dare do. So it has to invent another fiction of its own, that today’s white-appointed black cultural ruling class with their assimilation anxiety narratives are actually dangerous rebels while the rest of America can’t get enough of hood lit and John Singleton movies.

Sintara’s last line to Monk is delivered as a mic drop moment, and after this scene, Monk engages in deep self-reflection. By the end of the movie, Monk has humbled himself and acquiesced to turning My Pafology into a movie, working hand-in-hand with the goofy white male director.

The Monk-Sintara exchange is not in the novel. In fact, Jenkins is not even a judge on that panel and she and Monk never meet. But Sintara had to be given a bigger role so she could act as a mouthpiece for American Fiction’s creators and supporters, to deliver the movie’s true message: for the current black cultural elite, there is no such thing as selling out, because it’s finally their turn and nobody (especially not other black people, especially not other lower-class black people) has a right to make them feel bad for doing what they must in order to become rich and famous. And for those that dare try to criticize them, their characters will be assassinated, like how Monk was accused of being a misogynist.

Contrast this to Erasure’s ending, where Monk dazedly goes up to the stage to accept a prize meant for Stagg R. Leigh:

I looked at the faces, all of them, from time and out of time, but it was my mother to whom I spoke most directly. “The roses will forever smell beautiful,” I said. Then the lights were brighter than ever, not flashes but constant, flooding light. I looked at the television cameras looking at me.

I looked at the mirror, still held by the boy. He held it by his thigh and I could only imagine the image the glass held.

I chose one of the TV cameras and stared into it. I said, “Egads, I’m on television.”

This ending is haunting, implying that Monk has gone insane due to his literary obsessions, professional jealousies, and moral compromising. His character’s ending mirrors that of his own protagonist from My Pafology, Van Go Jenkins, who says something similar when he is arrested for rape on a lowbrow daytime talk show. Erasure raises real questions and offers no easy answers, whereas American Fiction offers a preview of how those elite few that rose during the social justice era—an era that is now falling out of fashion—will maneuver to consolidate their gains.

When compared to such calculated cynicism, Andrew Boryga’s Victim is refreshingly candid. It tells the story of Javier Perez, a young Puerto Rican man from the Bronx who eventually learns in high school that his difficult upbringing (for instance, as a young child, he witnesses the murder of his drug-dealing father), when combined with his writing skills, gives him a red-carpet path to elite colleges and prestigious literary publications. And so he plays up his racial victim identity to prey upon the gullible and well-meaning sympathies of guidance counselors, professors, college social groups, woke women he has crushes on, editors, and social media audiences to pursue his professional and personal desires.

Victim acknowledges that class, just as much as (maybe even more so than) race, creates differences in our values and perceptions. When Javi is trying to write his college essay, he tries to wheedle some useful trauma stories from his mother about his impoverished childhood. She becomes offended and points out that he’s always had food, shelter, and family, and that they are not on some “hand-out line.” This is in stark contrast to when he attends Donlon College (pseudo-Cornell), where all the affluent Latino students proudly embellish their lower-class bona fides. You have to be rich to like being poor.

The novel even strongly suggests that views on hot-button issues like policing and criminal justice reform are divided more along class and educational lines, rather than racial lines. When he is at college, Javi and his friends protest police brutality against Latinos and other minorities. But as a teacher at a Bronx public school after college, when he tries to get his students impassioned about a national firestorm over the police killing another young man of colour, he is met with mixed reactions:

Guadalupe, whose thick black hair fell from either side of her center part like a river, picked at her cuticles. “Yeah, but like, didn’t he have a knife and like wasn’t he wiling out?”

Miguel aimed the tip of his pencil in the air and slashed. “I saw it on YouTube. My son was out here like Jason before twelve showed up. He was kinda wilin’.”

However, Victim pulls its punches far too much to be the “fearless satire” its publisher’s description says it is. I admire its intentions and even the mere fact that it got published, so I wish I’d liked it more. But the problem is that taking potshots at silly woke kids and professors, as well as social justice online culture, in 2024 isn’t enough. Maybe in 2014, it would’ve been bold and fresh. I strongly suspect that Boryga has a much more hard-hitting novel in him; perhaps there are limitations placed on a first-time novelist.

Here’s Javi’s take on Twitter identitarian thinkpiece culture:

The “conversation” could still be found on Twitter and other social media outlets. But things online no longer stayed online; they were remarked upon by world leaders, they changed policies, they got people fired and condemned. Whenever there was a new swell of a story, an issue, a trending topic, my job was to try to hop on the wave and provide some personal context that was in stark contrast to the nuts-and-bolts things that the real “reporters” at the publication focused on—my headlines were always something like “Why [Insert News Event] Matters to Me as a [Insert Relevant Identity Marker]” or When [Insert News Event] Happened, It Triggered My [Insert Trauma/Past Harm That Is Sort of Relevant]”—and collect the followers, page likes, and clicks that The Rag prized above all else.

The above is entirely true, but everybody knows it now. Case in point: one of Boryga’s readings was hosted by Xochitl Gonzalez, whose piece for The Atlantic on noise and gentrification is exactly a product of the identitarian culture that Victim is skewering. Had the novel lived up to its potential, someone like her should be hating, not loving, it.

As Javi tries to jumpstart his writing career, he begins to twist and fabricate stories to satisfy the hunger of his editors and audience that want the right message from the right type of Latino. But his pieces for The Rag (which is something like The New Yorker meets McSweeney’s) barely rise to the level of a freshman op-ed for a college paper. Perhaps it’s a commentary on how low the standards are for identitarian writing at liberal online publications, and granted, that’d be a fair point. But if so, the satire still isn’t biting enough. Javi is, if not exactly too nice, too non-contemptuous of the people he’s fooling.

In Erasure, just look at how palpable Monk’s seething hatred of the mainstream publishing world is in this passage from My Pafology, where Van Go is listing all the children he plans to have:

I dreams when I’m sleepin and it be on an island somewhere in them islands down there. There be all these beautiful, fine-ass bitches walkin round wearin nuffin but strings over they nipples and shit. I think, damn, these some fine bitches here and I know they gone give me some and I start countin the babies I’m gone make and I start thinkin up names for them babies. Their names gone be Avaricia, Baniqua, Clitoria, Dashone, Equisha, Fantasy, Glinique, Hobitcha, I’youme, Jamika, Klauss, Latishanique, Mystery, Niggerina, Oprah, Pasticha, Quiquisha, R’nee’nee, Suckina, Titfunny, Uniqua, Vaselino, Wuzziness, Yolandinique and Zookie.

I laughed at this aloud, but then I was made uncomfortable by why I laughed. Is it because I knew the passage was patently ridiculous? A brilliant satire! Or subconsciously, maybe I didn’t think it was? Maybe deep down, I thought there were actually some black people who do think like this, and I found that uproarious?

Victim’s best element is the relationship between Javi and Anais, his girlfriend whom he meets in college. She is a Latina/white cheerleader-turned-revolutionary from the wealthy suburbs whose militant persona at Donlon quickly evaporates whenever she goes home to her strict father (he’s a cop) and doting mother. When she and Javi decide to move to New York City after graduation, they fight over where to live. He wants to move to his familiar Bronx, while she wants to move to gentrifying Brooklyn. When she becomes enamoured with a Brooklyn luxury condo with its nearby poetry-hosting coffee shops and renovated community centers, she claims they can’t be gentrifiers because they’re brown.

Had the novel been entirely about Javi and Anais’ relationship, it could’ve exposed all the hypocrisies about contemporary virtue-signaling culture it wanted to reveal, but in a more nuanced and organic way. Regrettably, all their fights are dealt with in mere paragraphs. It felt like eating a dish that had been microwaved when it ought to have been braised. I would’ve loved to be inside Javi’s head for multiple chapters when Anais inevitably leaves him for a white tech bro while justifying it to Javi because she’s actually colonizing the colonizer.

But for all my criticisms, I’m glad Victim was published (thanks for signing my copy, Andrew) because it’s at least a step in the right direction out of constrictive identitarian writing. And to its credit, it’s not dishonest like American Fiction. The danger is that tiny concessions are often mistaken for baby steps. There’s no guarantee that Victim is the first step among many; it could very well be the only one allowed. So for those who want more, we all have to keep pressing.

1. For an excellent discussion on American Fiction, check out this Champagne Sharks episode (hosted by

Champagne Sharks

and ft. the playwright Michael R. Jackson, filmmaker Mtume Gant, writer Jason England, and academic Richard Purcell)