Invisible Man as Prophetic
In our last reading of Invisible Man, I felt like I was reading a recent story and not something written in 1952. Everything from the illegally selling something on the street corner, to the cops, to then so quickly being killed was so eerily similar to the Eric Garner case that I wasn’t sure if I was reading the chapter right. Brother Clifton’s death is, I’m sure, a turning point for our narrator, but I feel like it represents so much more. This entire book, our narrator has led us through the various systems in which racism can exist: high school, college, Wall Street, a paint factor, medical treatment, and even social change groups. Our narrator, I feel like, is meant to allow the reader to experience these system through a vague voice so the reader’s own experience can enter the reading of the book. I think these systems of racism were meant to be a warning for a future that we clearly did not heed. As in the paint factory, many of the institutions in this country are built on black (and other ethnic minorities) shoulders to hold up the white elite. Brother Clifton, Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray – they all represent to me the same kind of victim and the same kind of warning. I don’t think Ellison was prophetic, I just think he had an incredible ability to be able to see how various events and systems could play out. He understood how people and how institutional racism operated. This whole semester, we have been discussing race, and racism, and the question of the “other”. We have seen it in both Ellison and Melville and we saw it in Justin Simien’s movie. To me, this whole semester has taught me that in 200 years, nothing has really changed. There are different laws, and different issues, but at the end of the day the same systems are still in place that oppress ethnic minorities.