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Anthony Taylor
Ms. Loughrey
ENG4U
May 22, 2019
Transgression in Everybody’s Son
In modern society, mankind is classified into groups called “races” based on skin tone
which has led to the mistreatment of many different races in history. In the novel, Everybody’s
Son by Thrity Umrigar, Anton is put into a transgressive community where everyone around him
including his mom, his adoptive father, and mother, and himself. In society, people fall victim to
racism mainly due to their appearance and are thus not treated how they should be treated like
everyone else in the majority. In this case, the majority is the White community and the minority
is the Black community. This is first seen while Anton is driving on a country road in Georgia,
who is visibly Black but actually a mix between a Black mother and a White father who lived with
an all White family who raised him was pulled over by a White state trooper for no apparent
reason and did not get a reason as to why he was pulled over in the first place. Anton wondered
if he was going to be attacked which is made apparent when he said, “This is the racial
stereotype that all members of the Black community must deal with on a daily basis just
because they are members of the Black community in a mainly White state.
When Anton was a 9 year old boy whose mother had been arrested for leaving him
alone with non-proper conditions locked up in a room while she went out to get crack, David, the
judge who had put his mother behind bars wanted to adopt him as David had recently lost his
own son and was mourning his loss but saw Anton as a son that he wanted. This is a
transgressive seen as a judge wanting to adopt the son of a convict is not heard of very often as
well as a White man wanting to adopt a Black child in the ’90s is also very unheard of. Connor,
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who is one of David’s close friends highly doubted David’s choice to adopt Anton solely on the
basis that Anton is a mix between Black and White but looks more Black than White. This is
transgressive as well as now in society, people do not tend to judge people on who they decide
to adopt based on looks alone as much.
After David adopts Anton and puts Anton through elementary school, it is made apparent
that Anton is the only black kid in the whole school and one of the only Black people in the
building except for the janitors that work there. Umrigar is using the lack of Black people to
convey the message that Black people are highly transgressive and thought of as lesser than
the White community as in society, people tend to judge janitors as people who were not able to
achieve anything in life. This is also racist as the author was conveying the message that Black
people could not go far in life when compared to the White community.
By being adopted into a family who is not part of the same race nor culture at a very
young and impressionable age, Anton had adopted not only the culture of the Coleman family,
the family David was the h...
