American Fiction: 'The majority of scientists will tell you that race is not real'

 With American Fiction in cinemas, Wright, Sterling K  Brown and Cord Jefferson talk race, family and black storytelling, Rachael Davis writes.

Erika Alexander and Jeffrey Wright in American Fiction, currently in cinemas. 

In popular culture, whether that’s books, films, music or television shows, the black American experience is often depicted as being nothing short of traumatic. Drug addiction, slavery, crime, heartache, poverty – stories of being black in America are often pigeonholed into these reductive vignettes, leaving little space for stories that are not centred around trauma.

American Fiction’s protagonist Thelonious 'Monk' Ellison, played by Jeffrey Wright, is fed up with these lazy, monotonous stories. He’s a writer, a professor of English literature, but tires of his novels not attracting publishers because they’re deemed “not black enough”. Meanwhile, the literary sector’s eyes are all trained on the author of a new bestseller titled We’s Lives In Da Ghetto, a trauma-porn novel Monk thinks panders to readers looking for stereotypical black misery.