Support for Suicide

In White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty, many people read the ending of the book as a bleak sign that Gunnar and the rest of the black community have given up and there's no hope for the future. They see suicide as the easy way out and look down upon Gunnar for not fighting racism and going down swinging.

This view is definitely understandable and as much as I disagree, I have trouble finding the words to contradict this view of suicide that's the norm in western culture. But as we talked about in class, a missed free throw isn’t hurting the player, it's hurting the crowd. And a dead baby born into slavery doesn't hurt the mother, it hurts the slaver. When people say “Oh he had so much to live for, so did that baby born a slave. Each had so much to offer the white man and so little to live for within themselves.

There will always be other boys who can play basketball and poets too. If Gunnar hadn't played with Scoby that one day would he still have something to live for? Would he be worth anything at all? If Psycho Loco, the gangbanging killer, had decided to die, is that important? Did he have something to live for? When the officers were acquitted on all charges for the Rodney King beating Gunnar says he feels worthless. That being a black person in America meant your life meant nothing. And I think that's what Beatty is trying to get across. He's a black boy who’s life without his standout skills is essentially meaningless to us and American does not love him enough to stop him.

Gunnar says to Psycho Loco that he just wants to win for once. But to him, winning isn't making the last free throw, it’s throwing the game.

Laughter or Love

Richard Wright’s critique of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is centered around the fact that Hurston’s characters and method of telling a story could be a continuation of minstrelsy. I understand that Wright sees the comedic dialogue between townspeople as something playing on stereotypes of southern black people just to entertain a white audience. Similarly, the concept of the happy field worker, which is seen in Hurston’s depiction of life in the Everglades, is a trope found often throughout the history of minstrel shows. For Wright to see her work through this lense makes sense, especially because as a protest writer, Wright was very concerned with his audience and their perception of his characters. However, I don’t think that this criticism is applicable to Their Eyes Were Watching God.


Hurston isn’t an author who is attempting to cater to a white audience in this novel. As a woman who grew up in the town she features in her novel and who studied the vernacular and oral traditions of people she writes about. Her story mimics the type of oral folktales that I myself grew up with. The type of comedic interactions in between people are very reminiscent of interactions between Brer Possum and Brer Rabbit, Little Eight John and his mother and many other people in stories that have been passed down. The comedy seems to me to be a tool to connect with what may be familiar to a lot of black readers and it seems that this is a work of familiarity and love rather than one of mocking.

Everything Black is Pun Intended

For a poetry reading some weeks ago someone read the poem “Black Privilege” by Crystal Valentine. This poem examines some of the things black people have been forced to do over time and calling it “black privilege” as a mockery of non-black people who claim such thing exists.

In the poem she says “Black privilege is being so unique that not even God will look like you.” She says not even God will look like you. Not that he just happens to not look like you, but that he won’t. It shows that to be black is so undesirable that not even God, who is said to have created people in his image, would be willing to look like you. And while this is a perfectly legitimate thing for a black woman to say who has spent all of her life being told that black isn’t beautiful, that black isn’t right. For her to express frustration in the fact that people say over and over again that white is holy and black isn’t is totally reasonable and justified. But what does it mean for a person who isn’t black to read this poem and talk about these things to a room full of a majority non-black people?

What does it mean when the author of the poem writes “And it’s tirin’, you know? For everything about my skin to be a metaphor, for everything Black to be pun intended, to be death intended,” and then we sit for the rest of the fifteen minutes trying to make metaphors from her blackness and trying to find death in her words?

What does it mean for her to say “Black privilege is having to have the same sense of humor as Jesus. Remember how he smiled on the cross? The same way Malcolm X laughed at his bullet,” as we go on and find humor in Invisible Man  and find jokes in the poems we read?

How is it fair for us to take her experience and her suffering and pick it apart to search for enough symbolism to satisfy us? How is it fair to call someone a pale poet if we aren’t satisfied?

Real Eyes Realize Real Lies

The narrator’s first supposed revaluation in Invisible Man came from Bledsoe when he finally “takes off his mask” and shows the narrator his true colors. Reiterating what his grandfather had told the narrator in chapter one, he tells him about how you have to act submissive in order to gain power in the world. But none of this really resonates with the narrator at the time and he still just leaves the room confused and just as blind as before.

In chapter ten of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man the narrator has his eyes opened once again to the harsh reality that is the letters Bledsoe told him to give to people in New York. The young Mr. Emerson figuratively lifts the veil that has been over the eyes of the narrator when he shows him what the letter to Mr. Emerson said and this seems to wake some sort of consciousness in the narrator. While I think that there is some development in the character’s consciousness, I think the growth is minimal and change does not necessarily mean improvement.

Before the narrator knew the contents of the letter, he said that his aspirations were to be like Bledsoe, “I’d really like to become Dr. Bledsoe’s assistant,” he says (184). But after reading the letter, his plans do an about-face and he is overcome with a deep anger and an overwhelming desire for revenge.

Later in the book, the narrator realizes that people do not really see him when Brother Jack’s glass eye falls out into his glass because the thing the thought was seeing him really saw nothing at all.

But his final and arguably his most important realization is when he finally realizes that he is invisible to most people that supposedly “see” him. He realizes this when he walks around Harlem in a measly disguise and everyone mistakes him for Rinehart, a mysterious character that seems to take on a different identity to everyone who he meets.

It could be argued that Rinehart is the most important character in the book for the narrator’s development in his invisibility but both literally and figuratively, not once do we ever actually see him. The entirety of Rinehart’s identity that we as readers know is labels and descriptions of him from those around him, and all of these are different.

In a way, Rinehart is a repetition of everything that has happened so far to the narrator in this book because we see the narrator as someone who has repeatedly had identities placed on him in the Battle Royal, the Liberty Paints factory, when he was trying to find a place to dispose of the remains of the bank he broke at Mary’s house, and finally when walking around Harlem in the end. No one really knows who or what he is but they continue to try to tell him. They all see something different which means they really aren’t seeing at all.

A Credit to the Race

What does it mean to be a “credit to the race?”

In Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Mary tells the narrator to make sure that he is a credit to the race in whatever he does. The narrator in Invisible Man does not want Mr. Norton to talk to Trueblood because he feels as if he would hurt Mr. Norton’s perception of the race. And in the poem “Citizen ,I” by Claudia Rankine, the author considers whether it was up to her to apologize to the woman about her child not getting accepted into the college she like and whether it’s up to her to defend affirmative action to the woman.

A repeating theme in these poems and novels is the idea that a black person must always be a representative of their race and that they can do nothing wrong ever for fear of tarnishing the reputation of all other black people. But is it the responsibility of black people to always represent their entire race? Why can’t people just represent themselves and not be expected to explain the mentality and actions of “their people?”

Often times characters such as Trueblood would be considered dangerous or detrimental to black people because he represents a stereotype that white America is often only too happy to have confirmed. When someone does or says something that correlates with a subconscious stereotype that people have, this stereotype unfortunately reinforced, whether or not the stereotype is true.

But how is this fair? Why can’t Trueblood just be one horrible but isolated incident that reflects badly on only Trueblood himself? We don’t even really know why we are so worried about Trueblood’s story but all we, and the narrator, know is that we desperately don’t want Mr. Norton to know.

We as readers are also frustrated when  he sucks up to the white people in Invisible Man and does not act as what we would consider a credit to the race. But why should he have to? Why can’t the narrator simply get his education and become successful and leave his worries behind? Does he have some kind of duty to stand for the people standing for him? Is it okay for him to cut ties with the South and become a new person in New York, or does he have a responsibility to share whatever he makes of himself with those he left behind? And if there is that duty, why isn’t it one shared by white people?

As we talked about in class discussions, often times people look to the minority in the room when talking about race related topics because they expect the person of color to speak for all people of the same race as them. But why is it the responsibility of these minorities to speak for so many individual people? And in some situations, can they?

Stay in School?

Often times we are taught that education is the key to success in our modern society but many authors argued that for black people, education can be more harmful than helpful.

Written in 1933, The Miseducation of the Negro by Dr. Carter G. Woodson was a precursor to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. In The Miseducation of the Negro,Woodson writes “The ‘educated negroes’ have an attitude of contempt towards their own people because [...] Negroes are taught to admire the Hebrew, the Greek, the Latin, and the Teuton and to despise the African,” “There would be no lynching if it did not start in the school room. Why not exploit, enslave, or exterminate a class that everybody is taught to regard as inferior,” and all of these ideas were restated in many later works of literature.

In Invisible Man this scorn for education is very clear in the story. The narrator shows a clear disdain for the other boys at the battle royal whom he does not identify with as he is a good student and they are not. This illustrates Woodson’s point in that when black people receive the same education as white people they will grow to be ashamed of themselves and dislike their people. As the narrator says “I didn't care too much for the other fellows who were to take part. They were tough guys.” The narrator feels that he is smarter than them and headed on the “right path” and thus feels superior.

Also, the way the narrator describes the statue of Booker T. Washington in the terms of either lifting the veil of blindness or pushing it down further is very suggestive of Dr. Woodson’s argument that lynching starts in the school room and that education is an easy way to keep people in line. The author describes how in his younger years he gave the speech on humility to get the scholarship from the older white people. By the nature of the assignment, the narrator is being educated for the satisfaction and pleasure of the white people and he is saying the things they want him to say. He’s being trained to go down the path that they want him to be on.

This is especially visible in the end of his dream about his grandfather in the last letter that he is told to read aloud. For the letter to say keep the narrator running implies that he’s gonna be made to keep running and running where the white people want and still not really getting anywhere. The entire Battle Royal scene shows that the narrator is just there for their entertainment and benefit. And one can argue that education for the benefit of others is no real education at all.  So either the blind is being raised as he is getting his education, or according to Woodson’s perspective, the more he is being educated by the white man, the blinder he is becoming.