A Systematic Problem That Has Lasted Far Too Long

It’s no coincidence that pictures of police brutality from the Civil Rights Movement could easily be mistaken for pictures of police brutality today during the Black Lives Matter movement. The movements against systematic racism of the 50s/60s and today are the same fight with different names. 

On August 9th, 2014, Michael Brown, a black, unarmed 18-year-old, was walking down the street when Officer Darren Wilson, a white man, asked him to move to the sidewalk. After Brown talked back, an altercation ensued and Officer Wilson shot and killed Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. This led to the Ferguson Riots, a time of unrest within the city in response to the shooting. Although the Black Lives Matter movement had been founded just a little over a year prior, this incident was the true catalyst that made the movement as big as it is today. 

Tod Clifton, a young and articulate character in Invisible Man, is introduced as the Brotherhood’s Youth Leader. Soon after being called out for selling out to the Brotherhood though, he disappears, only later to be found on the street selling dancing, paper Sambo dolls. The scene that follows shows Clifton being shot down by a police officer for resisting arrest for selling the dolls without a permit. His death is what drives the black community in the book to fight back. At his funeral, the narrator says, “‘He thought he was a man and that men were not meant to be pushed around. But it was hot downtown and he forgot his history, he forgot the time and the place’” (457). 

Police have been targeting people of color, specifically those belonging to the black community, for over a century. This is a product of racism, and Invisible Man is a timeless example of how little things have changed since 1952. The parallels between the two stories above are appalling. The narrator’s line in chapter twenty, “‘I was saying that up here we know that the policemen didn’t care about Clifton’s ideas. He was shot because he was black and because he resisted. Mainly because he was black . . . If he’d been white, he’d be alive. Or if he’d accepted being pushed around...’” is much too similar to articles on police brutality today (469). Tod Clifton’s story and death tell a tale worth every American’s attention. 

Clifton is a symbol of invisibility manifesting amongst the black community, whereas the character Rinehart--a man who easily slips between different personas depending on who he’s talking to--explores the existential state of invisibility. It’s important to look at both characters, especially how invisibility relates to today’s Black Lives Matter movement.

The movement fights for “freedom, liberation, and justice,” but there is a question worth demanding an answer to: why aren’t these given in the first place? The continued fight for these things shows that their cries for equality from the start of the Civil Rights Movement to today have not been heard--each individual is made to be invisible amongst a crowd. The black community is often seen as an amorphous being, a conglomerate of the stereotypes that people attach to black people. Rinehart’s character explores the existential state of this, as he is many things in one: “Rine the runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the Reverend” (498). Because of his invisibility within his race, he can be whatever he wants. Clifton’s character explores the physical manifestation of invisibility.

During the narrator’s eulogy at Clifton’s funeral, he realizes that he sees “not a crowd but the set faces of individual men and women” (459). Ellison tries to show the reader what he’s been getting at all along, that being the invisibility caused by racial constructs. Here he makes his point, but underneath it he has been poking fun at it all along: dividing people into groups and defining who they are based on the color of their skin is absurd.