'American Fiction' Spares No One

“OK, let’s begin.” American Fiction opens with Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) intoning that phrase to his students on a nameless California college campus, as he initiates a discussion of Faulkner—only to have his seminar derailed by an overly sensitive white undergraduate who complains about the presence of the “n-word” in the novels. After Monk brusquely instructs her to “get over it,” the college suspends him from teaching duties for the rest of the semester. This ridiculous and yet sadly predictable gambit—an institution privileging a white adolescent’s discomfort around Blackness over that of a fiftysomething African American man, for whom race is a lived reality—establishes the film’s willingness to mock the pieties that surround the politics of race in the USA in the twenty-first century.