Morel – The Diversity of American Individualism in Ralph Ellison
The Diversity of
American Individualism in Ralph Ellison’s Writings
by Lucas E. Morel
Associate Professor of Politics
Washington and Lee University
Presented for the
Philadelphia Society’s Fall Regional Meeting
“Black History and
Conservative Principles”–
Panel: The Uneasy
Case for Elites and Excellence
October 1-2, 2004
“The invisible man
is the individual.” Clarence
Thomas, 2004
This year saw widespread
commemoration of, and commentary on, the Brown
v. Board of Education decision during its 50th anniversary.
When Ralph Ellison heard the high court’s decision, he wrote, “[S]o
now the Court has found in our favor and recognized our human psychological
complexity and citizenship and another battle of the Civil War has been won.
The rest is up to us and I’m very glad.”[i]
For him, the Brown
case showed how black Americans “turned the Supreme Court into the forum of
liberty it was intended to be, and the Constitution of the United States into a
briarpatch in which the nimble people, the willing people, have a chance.”[ii]
A decade later Ellison would write that the Brown
decision and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “induced
no sudden transformation of character; it provided the stage upon which they
could reveal themselves for what their experiences have made them, and for what
they have made of their experiences.”[iii]
Ellison always
acknowledged that black Americans have suffered by law and custom from racial
prejudice. Echoing in his own way
the premises of Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, Ellison said of
blacks in America: “Our social
mobility was strictly, and violently, limitedóand in a way that neither our
Christianity nor belief in the principles of the Constitution could change.”[iv] Nevertheless,
Ellison argues they were not simply victims of the majority-white society.
They drew upon their own wit and resources to fashion a way of life,
especially in the South, that contributed to the growth and development of the
United States. With racial bigotry
an American reality for the foreseeable future, Ellison argued that “the
obligation of making oneself seen and heard was an imperative of American
democratic individualism.”[v]
That said, racial
prejudice still tainted policy discussions a decade after the Civil Rights
Movement reached its apex in the mid-1960s.
Ellison described how the “anger erupting among young blacks” in the
1970s was more than just a reaction to overt bigotry:
It
makes them furious when whites respond to their complaints with, “Yes, but I
had nothing to do with any of that,” or reply to their demands for equal
opportunity in a racially rigged society, “We’re against a quota system
because we made it on our individual merits”óbecause this not only
sidesteps a pressing reality, but is only partially true.
Perhaps they did make it on their own, but if that’s true the
way was made easier because their parents did not have to contend with my
parents, who were ruled out of the competition.[vi]
It’s not that
Ellison wanted his white neighbors to bend over so he can kick their behinds to
get even; rather, as he put it, “The point is one of moral perception, the
perception of the wholeness of American life and the cost of its successes and
failures.”[vii]
Because blacks in America have been viewed as a group, according to their
color as opposed to their individual character and experience, many white
Americans tend to perceive them as living a separate existence from the
mainstream of American life.
This leads whites to think of their own achievements wholly
apart from the reality of American society, where blacks were never far from the
social, economic, or political action of the greater community.
This moral blind spot to the presence of blacks, and hence to their
contribution (willing and otherwise) to America’s prosperity, divides whites
from blacks to this day.
After the civil
rights victories of the mid-‘1960s, black nationalism and separatism was on
the rise. Ellison saw this as an
ill-conceived reaction to white supremacy; he considered it just another form of
secession. He lamented that
“certain Negroes, who for years have been satisfied to be merely human and
stake their chances upon individual attainment, are succumbing to blackness as
a value.”[viii]
He blamed militant leaders of the Black Power movement, like Stokely
Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, for preaching the repudiation of middle-class
values for the emotionally satisfying but intellectually vacuous reason of
rejecting all things white. To
reject American values as merely white values was to reject much of what made
black Americans who they were, as well as what and who made America what she
was.[ix]
These so-called reformers failed to acknowledge that the American
experience included black as well as white contributions; or, as Ellison put it,
“whatever else the true American is, he is also somehow black.”[x]
As you might
expect, Ellison was criticized in the wake of the “black power” movement for
not doing enough in his writings to promote the cause of civil rights.[xi]
What the black nationalists failed to understand was that his writing
promoted the Civil Rights Movement, only in a different way than turning his
writing into propaganda.[xii]
Just after the end of World War II, Ellison wrote:
“A people must define itself, and minorities have the responsibility of
having their ideals and images recognized as part of the composite image which
is that of the still-forming American people.”[xiii]
He was devoted to elevating the humanity of black Americans by
incorporating their story into the story of America without trading on racial
stereotypes or pat sociological formulations.[xiv]
Also, by writing well, by perfecting his craft instead of turning it to
political sloganeering, Ellison tried to show all Americans that from the
equality of human beings can rise the individuality that brings forth
excellence.
Ellison argued
that even where freedom was professed full voice but limited by the color line,
individuals had the wherewithal to make themselves known.
He praised Richard Wright for accepting “his own individual responsibility
for seeing to it that America become conscious of itself.”[xv]
Ellison saw in Wright’s ambition and devotion to his writing a moral
assertion that flowed from a longstanding, black American tradition of not
“trading on one’s own anguish for gain or sympathy.”[xvi] This
acceptance of the challenge of his own human freedom led Wright to publish Native
Son, the first Book-of-the-Month-Club selection authored by a black
American, in 1940óthe same year John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath
and Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls were published.
Ellison said of Wright that “like a good Negro athlete, he believed in
his ability to compete.”[xvii]
Ellison believed
that black Americans, despite being “the targets of discrimination,”[xviii]
drew from their own humanity to ride out the burden of an oppression at odds
with American ideals. The majority
of black Americans have long believed that the founding principles of the
nation, as long as white Americans continued to profess them, would continue to
work their way into the American psyche and practice.
Ellison’s belief in human equality surfaces in his writings
through his affirmation of individual responsibility even in the face of
less-than-ideal circumstances. Unlike
proponents of strict multiculturalism and identity politics, who interpret the
American experience of blacks as racial reductionists, Ellison emphatically
denied that blacks were merely the sum total of their experiences under slavery
and segregation:
If
you have a society in which all men are created equal, . . . then it seems to me
that you must act out of an assumption that any people which has not been
destroyed after three hundred years of our history, and which is still here
among us, is a people possessing great human potentialities and strengths which
its members have derived from their background.[xix]
Himself
a black writer living in a predominantly white America, Ellison believed that a
person’s “individuality is still operative beyond the racial structuring of
American society.”[xx]
Although constrained by racial prejudice in law and custom, black
Americans were also participants in what Ellison called a “broader American
cultural freedom” that reposed a responsibility in each citizen to think and
act.[xxi]
Ellison took
pride in the example of blacks in his home state of Oklahoma who exhibited a
moral exuberance in the face of discriminatory conditions:
“For in that state our people fought back.
We seldom won more than moral victories, but we fought back, as can be
seen from the many civil rights victories that were initiated there.
And as can be heard in the Southwestern jazz . . . we were an assertive
people, and our mode of social assertion was artistic, mainly musical, as well
as political.”[xxii]
Ellison also
believed American society was in fluxóproducing what he called “the sheer
unexpectedness of life in these United States.”[xxiii]
Ironically for segregated America, this allowed blacks to exercise their
natural freedom more than their environment might appear to permit.
An obvious example is Ellison’s own discovery of English literature
while attending Tuskegee Institute (a black college of vocational and industrial
arts in Alabama) on a music scholarship. No
one told him which books to read (or to avoid, for that matter), which meant he
was literally free to read far and wide and to learn from those who “were in
the position to observe from the very top of the society to the very bottom.”
This is why Ellison exhorted black students in the 1960s to read novels,
precisely because blacks had been “choked off from knowing how society
operates.”[xxiv]
Reflecting on
what he, a black American, learned from Ernest Hemingway’s characters who
lived “outside the values of the larger society,” Ellison exclaimed:
“It doesn’t have to be, thank God, about Negroes in order to
give us insights into our own predicament.”[xxv]
Ellison appreciated his friend and fellow writer Richard Wright for his
testimony as a black boy raised in Mississippi but “who grew up and who
achieved through his reading a sense of what was possible out there in the wider
world.”[xxvi] Moreover,
Wright “wanted to be tested in terms of his talent, not in terms of his race
or Mississippi upbringing.”[xxvii]
At stake was the American principle of human equality, not racial
equality, and Wright was right in choosing the best human writers, not merely
black writers, as his standard for measuring his own achievements.
It was a choice Ellison ached for from an early age, as he observed in a
reminiscence about growing up in segregated Oklahoma:
It
was said by word of mouth, proclaimed in newsprint, and dramatized by acts of
discriminatory law that you were inferior.
You were barred from vying with them in sports games, competing in the
classroom or the world of art. Yet
what you saw, heard, and smelled of them left irrepressible doubts, so you ached
for objective proof, for a fair field of testing.[xxviii]
At a 1966 Senate hearing on
America’s cities, Ellison suggested that instead of government treating black
Americans “as though we are being legislated for rather than with,” laws
“should grant to each Negro his individuality.”[xxix]
This would help the diverse
individuals within the U.S. get “to know one another without the myths of
racial inferiority or superiority.” Simply
put, Ellison did not believe that race should be the measure of anyone’s
rights. Thus, when it comes to
securing the rights of all Americans, it’s the minority of one–the
individual–that should be the focus of the Constitution’s protection.
Of course, this belies current pleas for group
representation to promote diversity.
Driven by an identity politics hostile to the rights of the
individual, today’s affirmative activists have balkanized college campuses as
they seek to entrench a system of color-coded benefits and burdens. But
according to Ellison’s invisible man, “It’s winner take nothing’ that
is the great truth of our country or of any country.” A
truly common good will arise as we protect the diversity of each individual, and
not the racial isolationism of misguided multiculturalists.
“Let man keep his many parts, and you’ll have no tyrant states.”
Echoing the national motto, E
pluribus unum, he adds, “America is woven of many strands; I would
recognize them and let it so remain.”
When critics
chastised Ellison for preaching individualism to blacks instead of racial
solidarity, he referred them to the jazz giants of old, whom he called the
“stewards of our vaunted American optimism.”[xxx]
Ellison argued that blacks took
pride in Duke Ellington and Johnny Hodges “not because they were anonymous
bumps within the crowd, but because they were themselves.” He reminded them,
“If the white society has tried to do anything to us, it has tried to keep us
from being individuals,” and noted the irony in black leaders decrying black
individualism while they themselves were “doing all they can to suppress all
individuality but their own.”[xxxi]
Proud to be a Negro American,
Ellison still did not believe true freedom or human excellence would be found
down the road to color consciousness. As
he put it, “I don’t expect any special provisions to be made for me because
I’m a Negro who’s trying to write” novels.
Ellison was once
asked if he thought the Harlem Renaissance failed because it did not create
institutions to preserve the gains of black Americans. To which Ellison replied,
“No. We do have institutions. We have the Constitution and the Bill of
Rights. And we have jazz.”
Without the Constitution and Bill of Rights as political
touchstones for freedom of expression, even within a racially prejudiced
society, the Negro’s scope to create great art would be even more limited.
Ellison was always quick to remind his audience, black or white, not to overlook
what Negroes already possessed and could claim as their own.
But why the Constitution and Bill of Rights? How were
these the possession of a historically marginalized segment of America? Ellison
believed these pillars of American government must be claimed by and for black
Americans to the same extent as whites in order to affirm the equal humanity and
American-ness of the Negro. Ellison’s dream, like that of Martin Luther King,
Jr., was “deeply rooted in the American dream.” No white bigot’s ignorance
of the text of his own nation’s political charter–an ignorance of the very
basis of his own freedom–ought to stand in the way of Negro Americans claiming
and acting upon that same charter of freedom. That would give up the struggle
before it even began, to say nothing of neglecting the effort and sacrifice of
“many thousands gone” who had a literal hand (and head and heart) in
establishing the American regime. Though the nation’s founders committed the
“sin of American racial pride,” they also committed the ideal of human
equality to paper. In so doing, Ellison believed they gave blacks the firmest
ground for securing their rights as Americans.
As for jazz, it
was an art form that antedated and survived the Harlem Renaissance. Ellison saw
jazz as both a means and an end of Negro American freedom: it not only existed
as a body of musical expression, with its own techniques and traditions, but
also testified to the capacity of black Americans to thrive as artists within
segregated America. By creating
music that gave opportunity across the color line to excel, black Americans
offered a beacon of hope to others who would dare to succeed in what little or
great scope of freedom the majority-white society permitted.
And as black
musical excellence made itself known to wider audiences, but especially to black
audiences, interests beyond musical ones were piqued. The
young Ralph Ellison could, at first, strive to become a world-class trumpeter
and classical composer, only to be emboldened further to try his hand at
writing. Ellison once said that he knew no writers, but he knew many
musiciansó”many excellent musicians.”[xxxii]
Their excellence in the face of discrimination gave Ellison hope and
inspiration to write.[xxxiii]
While Ellison was a New Deal Democrat to the core, his
writings were anything but doctrinaire reflections of modern-day liberalism. A
man who received both the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Lyndon Johnson and
the National Medal of Arts from Ronald Reagan can hardly be placed in a
political box. Writing as the
consummate “insider-outsider,” Ellison offered his prose as an appreciative
critique of American society. In this he echoed Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote
in Democracy in America, “It is because I was not an adversary of
democracy that I wanted to be honest with it.”
In Ralph Ellison, we find an American writer who loved his country enough
to be honest with it. And it is
that honest appraisal of individuality, in a free and diverse America, that can
help bridge our present racial divide.
“Letter to Morteza Sprague” (19 May 1954), in “American
Culture is of a Whole’: From the Letters of Ralph Ellison,” intro. by
John F. Callahan, New Republic, (1 March 1999), 38.
“Letter to Albert Murray” (16 March 1956), Trading
Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, ed.
Albert Murray and John F. Callahan (New York: The Modern Library, 2000),
117. Hereinafter cited as Trading
Twelves.
“If the Twain Shall Meet” (8 November 1964), The Collected
Essays of Ralph Ellison, John F. Callahan, ed. (New York: The Modern
Library, 1995), 575. Hereinafter
cited as Collected Essays.
In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that segregated public
schools violated the equal protection clause of the 14th
Amendment. See Brown v.
Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, 347 U.S. 483.
Ellison emphasized that black Americans know “you prepare yourself
for desegregation and the opportunities to be released thereby before this
freedom actually exists. Indeed
it is in the process of preparation for an elected role that the techniques
of freedom are discovered and that freedom itself is released” (emphasis
in original). For Ellison,
“Civil rights are only the beginning.”
“Letter to Albert Murray” (28 September 1958), Trading
Twelves, 196.
John Hersey, “A Completion of Personality’: A Talk with Ralph
Ellison,” Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison, Kimberly
W. Benston, ed. (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1987), 298.
For a commentary on Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, see Lucas
E. Morel, Lincoln’s Sacred Effort: Defining Religion’s Role In
American Self-Government (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2000), Chap. 5,
“The Political Limits of Reason and Religion,” 163-210.
“A Special Message to Subscribers” (1980), Collected Essays,
351. The
theme of evading our national identity appears front and center in his
second novel, Juneteenth.
In the “Notes” section, Ellison offers a
restatement of the black American predicament:
“This society is not likely to become free of racism, thus it is
necessary for Negroes to free themselves by becoming their idea of what a
free people should be.” Ellison,
Juneteenth, 356. For
Ellison, the failure of white Americans to be “true to what you said on
paper,” as Martin Luther King, Jr., put it, did not absolve black
Americans of their responsibility to govern themselves according to their
best moral and intellectual lights. Martin
Luther King, Jr., “I See the Promised Land” (3 April 1968), I Have a
Dream: Writings and Speeches that Changed the World, James M.
Washington, ed. (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992), 197.
Hersey, “A Completion of Personality’: A Talk with Ralph
Ellison,” Speaking for You, 299.
Emphasis in original.
Ellison has the Rev. Hickman in Juneteenth utter a similar
sentiment: “And who can
blame those who don’t feel that they have to worry about the complicated
truths we have to struggle with? In
this country men can be born and live well and die without ever having to
feel much of what makes their ease possible, just because so much is buried
under all of this black and white mess that in their ignorance some folks
accept it as a natural condition.”
Juneteenth, 274-75; italics indicate an unspoken reverie of
Hickman to himself.
“If the Twain Shall Meet” (8 November 1964), Collected Essays,
568; emphasis in original.
“What America Would Be Like Without Blacks” (6 April 1970), Collected
Essays, 577-84.
“What America Would Be Like Without Blacks” (6 April 1970), Collected
Essays, 583.
For example, see Ernest Kaiser, “Negro Images in American
Writing,” Freedomways VII (Spring 1967), 152-63, in Twentieth
Century Interpretations of Invisible Man. John Reilly, ed. (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall,
1970), LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal, Black Fire:
An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (New York:
William Morrow and Co., 1968), “Ralph Ellison:
His Literary Work and Status,” Black World 20, no. 2
(December 1970), and Addison Gayle, The Way of the World:
The Black Novel in America (Garden City, N.J.:
Doubleday, 1975). For a
brief summary of the criticism offered by Ellison and others against the
Black Arts movement, see Jerry Gafio Watts, Amiri Baraka:
The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual (New York:
New York University Press, 2001), 201-202.
For example, in his famous response to Irving Howe (who criticized
Ellison along with Richard Wright and James Baldwin for insufficient protest
in their fiction), Ellison maintained that “my reply to your essay is in
itself a small though necessary action in the Negro struggle for freedom.”
“The World and the Jug,” Pt. II (3 February 1964), Collected Essays,
188.
“Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity”
(1946), Collected Essays, 99.
“[T]he true subject of democracy is not simply material well-being,
but the extension of the democratic process in the direction of perfecting
itself. The most obvious test
and clue to that perfection is the inclusion, not assimilation, of
the black man.” “What
America Would Be Like Without Blacks” (6 April 1970), Collected Essays,
582; emphasis in original.
“Remembering Richard Wright” (18 July 1971), Collected Essays,
674; emphasis in original.
“The World and the Jug,” Pt. I (9 December 1963), Collected
Essays, 159. He believed
Wright was “a possessor of that tradition.
It is resonant in his fiction and it was a factor in his eager
acceptance of social responsibility.”
“Remembering Richard Wright” (18 July 1971), Collected Essays,
668.
“A Very Stern Discipline'” (March 1967), Collected Essays,
733. Invisible Man was
published the same year as Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.
Ellison wrote that the narrator in Invisible Man exhibited a
similar “capacity for conscious self-assertion.”
“Introduction to the Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition of Invisible
Man” (10 November 1981), Collected Essays, 484.
He affirmed this of the American Negro church, as well.
See “Remembering Richard Wright” (18 July 1971), Collected
Essays, 668: “But there
was also the Negro church, wherein you heard the lingering accents of
nineteenth-century rhetoric with its emphasis upon freedom and individual
responsibility . . .”
Late in life, Ellison wrote an essay for New York Times Magazine (16
April 1989) entitled “On Being the Target of Discrimination.”
See Collected Essays, 819-25.
The title reflected his belief that while one may be the
“target” of discrimination, whether or not one is the “victim” of
discrimination remains an open question.
For Ellison, how black Americans have answered that question as
individuals has made all the difference.
“What These Children are Like” (September 1963), Collected
Essays, 547.
Hersey, “A Completion of Personality’:
A Talk with Ralph Ellison,” Speaking for You, 295.
As Ellison put it: “Any
people who could endure all of that brutalization and keep together, who
could undergo such dismemberment, resuscitate itself, and endure until it
could take the initiative in achieving its own freedom is obviously more
than the sum of its brutalization.” “A
Very Stern Discipline'” (March 1967), Collected Essays, 737.
“A Special Message to Subscribers” (1979), Collected
Essays, 351.
“Remembering Richard Wright” (18 July 1971), Collected Essays,
668. An example of the kind of
political activity begun in Oklahoma is Lyons (W.D.) v. Oklahoma
(1944), a state court case dealing with forced confessions.
Thurgood Marshall, then lead counsel for the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People, counted it a victory when his client only
received a life sentence instead of the death penalty!
Marshall wrote to NAACP headquarters that the sentence “shows
clearly that the jury believed him [Lyons] innocent.”
Juan Williams, Thurgood Marshall:
American Revolutionary (New York:
Random House, 1998), 118. See
also Sipuel (Ada Lois) v. Oklahoma State Regents (1948), a case
involving all-white, state law schools.
Williams, Thurgood Marshall, 176-79.
“Going to the Territory” (20 September 1979), Collected Essays,
591.
“Indivisible Man” (December 1970), Collected Essays, 385.
“A Very Stern Discipline'” (March 1967), Collected Essays,
749, 750; emphasis in original. For
example, Ellison wrote: “So
in Macon County, Alabama, I read Marx, Freud, T. S. Eliot, Pound, Gertrude
Stein and Hemingway. Books
which seldom, if ever, mentioned Negroes were to release me from whatever
segregated idea’ I might have had of my human possibilities. . . .
[H]ow could I be impressed by Wright as an ideological novelist?
Need my skin blind me to all other values?”
“The World and the Jug,” Pt. I (9 December 1963), Collected
Essays, 164, 165.
Ellison went on to explain what he drew from his friendship
with Richard Wright and what he found elsewhere to help him as a writer:
“He was generously helpful in sharing his ideas and information,
but I needed instruction in other values and I found them in the works of
other writers . . .” “The
World and the Jug,” Pt. II (3 February 1964), Collected Essays,
186-87.
“Remembering Richard Wright” (18 July 1971), Collected Essays,
674. Ellison saw Duke Ellington
and his orchestra as the musical counterpart to his literary heroes.
Ellington and his musicians and singers “were news from the
great wide world, an example and a goal . . .
Who were so worldly, who so elegant, who so mockingly creative?
Who were so skilled at their given trade and who treated the social
limitations placed in their paths with greater disdain?”
“Homage to Duke Ellington on His Birthday” (27 April 1969), Collected
Essays, 679.
“Remembering Richard Wright” (18 July 1971), Collected Essays,
675. See also “The World and
the Jug,” Pt. I (9 December 1963), Collected Essays, 163, where
Ellison observes: “Wright was
able to free himself in Mississippi because he had the imagination and the
will to do so.”
“On Being the Target of Discrimination” (16 April 1989), Collected
Essays, 826. Along these
lines, Ellison remarked, “We got to quit imposing second-class standards
on ourselves.” “Indivisible
Man” (December 1970), Collected Essays, 375.
“Harlem’s America,”
The New Leader (September 26, 1966):22-35.
“Homage to Duke Ellington on His Birthday,” Collected Essays,
678.
“Indivisible Man” (December 1970), Collected Essays, 394.
Ralph Ellison, “My Life and Yours,” typed manuscript, 15.
As Ellison once shared, he became a writer “because I had gotten
the spirit of literature and had become aware of the possibilities offered
by literatureónot to make money, but to feel at home in the world.”
“What These Children Are Like,” Collected Essays, 550