Erasure by Percival Everett the First Great Manifesto for Literature by African Americans in the 21st Century

While updating my list of the Hurston/Wright Award Winning books. I discovered that the 2002 Winner for Fiction Erasure wasn't on my site!  I ran a search and discovered this discussion forum, post, "On Percival Everett," from almost 20 years ago*.  It was such a good post I created an article out of it.

While I do not recall the original poster what I do recall was that the book discussion forum was great back then.  In fact, all the forums were popping back then.  I attribute the fall off to the rise of social media.  Which provided a much more compelling proposition to the end user.  

This signaled the beginning of a transition, on the web, to a "look at me mentality" and away from deeper conversations.  

*The discussion forums used to live on the Thumpercorner.com at least until Google banned advertising on the entire domain!  The felt our conversations would be in appropriate for the fragile sensibilities of their advertisers.  This is just one of the many ways Google hurt the Web by dictating to webmasters what content is appropriate for website.  Now the content is really no different that what we have today and Google had the ability to ban ads on individual pages.  Google is often heavy handed with their rules and I could argue they are more heavy handed with Black websites. 

There was one poster who had a penchant for posting photos of naked people which Google really disliked.  That is the only type of content that I will delete if I see it -- thanks Google.  Now, I could drop Google ads and do whatever I want, but Google is a monopoly (effectively) for online ad networks, so they call the shots.