A reviewer of Percival Everett’s 2011 novel, Assumption, recently stated that “in the second section [of the novel] — about a drug heist gone wrong that contains such mystery-novel archetypes as a one-armed villain and a daring escape from a moving van — Ogden’s race is never mentioned as he investigates the crime; race is treated as irrelevant to his character.” Ogden Walker, the novel’s protagonist, is black in the second section of Assumption, as he is in the first and third sections of the novel. The reviewer, however, makes the remarkable suggestion that race is irrelevant unless it is mentioned, and, moreover, that it must continue to be mentioned or else it will be rendered irrelevant. This is the kind of crucial error that is actively invited by Everett’s work. The reviewer assumes that Everett sees race in the simplistic way that the reviewer does, and that the Everett sees his readership as bluntly as the reviewer assumes them to be. Instead, Assumption may most productively be read as issuing the sort of challenge that Everett has been laying down to his readers since his first novel, Suder, was published in 1983. The challenge is to approach issues of race along with, rather than instead of, the other large questions encountered in serious fiction. This challenge is all-the-more significant with the rise of the notion of the “post-racial” in American public discourse. Everett’s novel and Barthes’s theorizing of the notion of mythology enable a critique of the post-racial and argue for an understanding of the instructive and critical challenges to the post-racial posed by Everett’s work.