The prologue of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man jarred me. It is written retrospectively, after the main action of the book has already occurred, so the reader is instantly thrown into the mindset of a man who they won’t meet again until near the end of the novel. The narrator is extremely angry at the world, his world, the world of young black men in America in the 1950s. His mentality is expressed as follows: “…you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it’s seldom successful” (4). He is frustrated and has been beaten-down by his white contemporaries. Sadly, it is not uncommon today for black people to still feel as if there voices aren’t being heard.
The narrator’s sentiments reminded me of the Black Lives Matter movement, whose mission is described on their official website as “to build local power and to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.” It is all-inclusive and its goals are to support and empower every member of the black community, such as LGBT+ and disabled individuals. The Black Lives Matter focus on the humanity and resilience that are intrinsic to the black community felt directly linked to Ellison’s main points in Invisible Man.
I found an article from Culture Trip which noticed a similar connections. The article claims that the high racial tensions pervasive in today’s America make Ellison particularly relevant. While it may seem that we have come a long way in the past sixty years, “Unemployment remains more than twice as high for African-Americans than it is for whites” and police violence against black people is still a major issue in our society. The article points out that the driving themes of the book are “anger at an unjust society [and] anger at what seems like the impossibility of changing it.” While the BLM movement didn’t set out to be an angry or resentful one, it is difficult for there not to be some degree of exasperation involved. Sixty years ago, white people were seen as having a greater position of power than black people, illustrated by the narrator’s view of Mr. Norton in the early chapters. This is, unfortunately, still true today.
The Black Lives Matter movement has been particularly concerned with white police officer violence and brutality directed toward black individuals for little more than the color of their skin. This issue is highlighted particularly well and realistically in the new young adult novel The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. In this book, a sixteen-year-old black girl witnesses her unarmed childhood best friend get shot by a white police officer three times in the back. The police officer claims he thought that the young man was reaching for a gun in his car, when in reality he was checking to see if the main character was all right, and there was nothing other than a hairbrush on the dashboard. The horrible murder that transpires in this book is, sadly, not merely fiction. Countless black men have been shot and killed by white police officers at an alarming rate over the past decade. The Black Lives Matter movement was born majorly in response to this violence in July 2013.
As the narrator’s grandfather said on his deathbed, “…our life is a war… Live with your head in the lion’s mouth” (16). The BLM movement is an important step toward recognition and equality for the black community, but there is still a strong sense of being the “other” and a distinct separation between blacks and whites in America today. This isn’t right, and it doesn’t make sense, and both Invisible Man and the Black Lives Matter movement force us to confront this fact and demand that we ask ourselves: what are we going to do about it?
Great post! I feel that the BLM movement is in many ways an example of the “action” that the narrator, in the prologue, feels unable to make. Perhaps, as we work our way towards the epilogue, we will be able to imagine the protagonist living in the future we have today where we see confident activists, driven by clear purpose, motivated by continued violence against black bodies in particular, and focused on creating a vision that is not exclusive, but necessarily expansive: it’s not just about black lives mattering to the exclusion of others; it’s about black lives being granted the full recognition (another key word) and respect and humanity that we strive for as a motivating American ideal, not matter how deferred and at times distant it always seems to be.
It’s interesting that Invisible Man remains such a relevant force. In some ways, its a book that takes on a world before (just before, really) the monumental decision of Brown. vs. the Board of Education that desegregated schools and led directly to the Civil Rights movement in the 60s. But insofar as the problems that motivated the Civil Rights movement still persist, and as segregation takes different forms, and as people continue to retreat into a stable sense of identity defined as much by what it is as what it isn’t (the others that threaten it) the book remains, as you say, as relevant as ever.
As an aside, the YA novel you mention (The Hate You Give) is our College Reads! selection for next year, so every first-year student will be receiving a copy. Should be a great shared intellectual and cultural experience for our campus!