About the Project

A Long Time Coming...

I read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man for the first time during my junior year of high school. I remember reading the first 50 pages or so when it was assigned and being somewhat bored at first because I didn’t really get it. However, my accelerated english teacher was great at asking us thought-provoking discussions that led to deeper understandings of the works that we read. He taught us about the importance of the blues in the text and I remember that our discussion of the battle royale scene sparked something in me. As we read more and more, I became fascinated with the text. I didn’t necessarily understand all of it at the time, but I knew enough to understand there were too many layers to tackle than we had time for in class.

I got to the scene where the narrator, Tobitt, and Brother Jack discuss Clifton’s death in chapter twenty-two and the narrator says, “He was shot because he was black and because he resisted. Mainly because he was black.” 

I had to put the book down for a moment. Michael Brown had been shot by a police officer only a few months earlier and I had to remind myself that the book had been written over fifty years ago. 

The book and its ideas carried with me through the rest of my schooling, resulting in a total of three major essays on three different aspects of the book between my junior year of high school and my sophomore year of college. There was one professor at Alma College, Dr. Laura von Wallmenich, that I wanted to do a project on Invisible Man with since day one. Choosing to go forward with an American Studies minor my junior year allowed me to finally do just that with my capstone.

The goal of the project is to provide a series of hyper essays that allow readers to navigate through certain parts of the book and how it relates to Black Lives Matter as well as offering further resources. There were originally four essays planned, but the COVID-19 pandemic unfortunately hindered my work and allowed the time and space for only two.

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There is a reason why this book stuck with me all this time, and that’s because of Ellison’s ability to create a surreal story that shows the absurdity of how deeply rooted a concept race really is. His point was not to say that race does not matter or is not real--it is a fact that some people are white and others are black. He was laughing in his own way at just how much that matters when it shouldn’t. 

As I pour over Invisible Man again and again, I realize just how much there is to it, and how the absurdity that Ellison was trying to address is worth every American’s time to read and understand the book.