“I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”
Ralph Ellison
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Ralph Ellison was seven years old when white supremacists massacred people in the African American neighborhoods of nearby Tulsa, OK over Memorial Day weekend 1921, leaving 10,000 black people homeless. Governor Robertson declared martial law to quell the violence. White-washed newspaper articles out east recorded 36 dead, but a report commissioned by Oklahoma eighty years later put the death toll as high as 300 people.
The “Tulsa Massacre” is still not taught in American public schools. I can’t imagine waiting for the public outcry over such terror only to have the whole incident swept under the rug like it never happened. An invisible tragedy against an invisible people.
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“Disillusionment” is the prevailing sentiment of Ellison’s electrifying novel Invisible Man. Ellison aims his pen at anyone who has turned his back on black Americans — the violent racists of Oklahoma; the “progressive” faculty at the black college Tuskegee; Booker T. Washington with his accommodationism to white supremacy; the plantations of the south built on slavery; the exploitative factory cities of the north built on the Great Migration. His language is evocative and multilayered; more James Joyce than Upton Sinclair or John Steinbeck.
It’s a book marked by terrible initiations into societies that refuse to “see” the black narrator. Eventually he concludes that the fault is not in a single person, place, or group. The problem is systemic. He has been rendered invisible and can do nothing to change it. It’s a terrifying realization.
The main theme – that black people should NOT be invisible, that black lives SHOULD matter – is as relevant now as it was when Ellison penned it.