African-American Literature

While reading chapter 22 of Invisible Man , a topic that the narrator brings up is the idea of blindness and how Brother Jake is unable to see the narrator and his race clearly. This reminded me of a TED Talk I saw in Gender Studies about color blindness in regards to race and discrimination. The TED Talk focused on the idea of being color blind versus color brave and how both of these play a role in racial discrimination. Color blindness can be defined as where one doesn't think about race or realize that they are inadvertently discrimination against someone based on race. Color braveness, on the contrary, is characterized by understanding that openly seeing one's race to have honest conversations about their experiences is beneficial because it can be used to  create better environments and opportunities for future generations. Even though Ellison is talking about invisibility rather than color blindness (especially because this term hadn't existed back then), reading abo...

In the first few chapters of Invisible Man , I wasn't totally fond of the narrator because I didn't like how he was constantly being manipulated and berated for things that weren't even his fault and he never really stood up for himself. The intense conversation between the narrator and Dr. Bledsoe in his office before the narrator gets sent to New York was the first time that I began to see another side of the narrator - a side where the narrator actually stood up for himself. However, that was very short lived because he soon got tricked again by Dr. Bledsoe with the letters in the briefcase. When the narrator first arrived in Harlem, it seemed like it would have been the place where the narrator started to realize things regarding his identity and invisibiliy because of how vibrant the setting and the people in it were described. The beginning of the narrator's understanding of invisibility is when Young Emerson reveals Dr. Bledsoe's treachery to him. While I...