The Face of Racial Inequality

Fifty-seven years after its publication in 1952, it is safe to say that Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is, in addition to being a luminous addition to our literary canon, a novel that has achieved that rare status of becoming an essential cultural artifact for understanding the American experience, much like the addresses of his namesake, Ralph Waldo Emerson. As a college professor, I have read and taught this capacious work since the late 1960s. With each encounter over forty years, I am rewarded by the discovery of something new in Ellison's text, for this is the kind of multi-layered literary and philosophical performance that we, as citizens concerned about the health of our republic, are obliged to re-read every ten or twenty years in order to check its insights and monitions against our cultural (and personal) progress and failures. As our understanding of liberty, equality, and this nation's ideals grows and evolves, our experience of Invisible Man deepens, achieving ever greater subtlety, nuance, and prescience.

Obviously, we do Ellison's masterpiece a great disservice if we read it on the most pedestrian, political, sociological, or surface level, for it is a novel that delights in play and ambiguity (that is, an over-richness of meaning) (Ralph, 1999). His central, famous trope of “invisibility” remains universally applicable for any group that is socially marginalized. While black Americans are certainly more “visible” today, especially after Barack Obama became this nation's first African American president, it is nevertheless true that so many other groups--- Hispanics, Asians, Pacific Islanders, new African immigrants to America, and native Americans to name just a few---can make a case for still being “invisible” men and women in contemporary America. Well might they argue that “on the lower frequencies,” Invisible Man speaks to their daily, lived experience(Ralph, 1999).

Yet even that observation doesn't entirely do justice to the epistemological profundity of this novel's central theme. We must admit that on some level we all remain noetic and ineffable---invisible and mysterious---to one another. Men and women. Blacks and whites. Westerners and Easterners. We are all victims of blindness to each other's open-ended being, and too often victims of the Other's attempts (from the Left and Right and Center) to define and categorize us, to use us as Ellison's Bledso, Brotherhood and Ras the Exhorter attempt to shape Invisible Man's naïve, young protagonist as they think best. If Ellison had lived just a little longer, I believe he would be delighted by the resonance his treatment of “invisibility” has with recent developments in cosmology. Dark matter, and dark energy, which was discovered only eleven years ago, make up 96 percent of the universe, with what we can see and measure accounting for only four percent. 90% of the universe is invisible to us---the unseen, untamed chaos of experience, as Ellison described it, which lies beyond our limited explanatory models, concepts, and the flawed, incomplete interpretations we forever attempt to impose upon what philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty once called “wild Being.” In other words, ...