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Invisible Man and African American radicalism in World War II
African American Review, Fall, 2005 by Christopher Z. Hobson
The protagonist offers, moreover, not one but three reasons why African Americans must "use the principle." One is that "no other fitted our needs"; that is, a political ideal of equality, individual and communal, suits African Americans' interests better than conceptions of class equality or race identification, the competing claims on the protagonist's allegiances. The protagonist gives no reason why this must be so, but this acceptance of a destiny and history in and of the United States comes soon after his realization of his and his tormentors' "American identity" (559). African Americans must also "use the principle" because "we ... could only thus find transcendence"--another undefined term, probably including transcendence of narrowly racial identity but also full human development, as well as getting African Americans and the United States as a whole beyond the US game of race. Lastly, in claiming that African Americans must affirm the principle because "we were older than they" and have marginally less "greed," "smallness," "fear," and "superstition," the protagonist lays claim to the African American traditions of nondiscrimination in the face of discrimination and fidelity to democracy despite its denial--traditions of course violated some of the time but less, the protagonist would say, than by others, and already demonstrated, though he could not then see it, by Halley, the barkeep at the Golden Day: "[W]e don't jimcrow nobody" (76). The protagonist is making a claim he has articulated before, that he or his group are "more human" (346), but now he bases this claim on the quality of African American experience and history. It is a claim of cultural-historical--rather than genetic--racial superiority, or the racial possession of a more finely honed, more democratic human culture, and in this respect it anticipates Juneteenth and shows readers how oversimplified is any reduction of Ellison's views in Invisible Man to mere integrationism.
In his third reconsideration of the grandfather's intent the protagonist extends to others the line of reasoning so far applied only to African Americans:
Or was it, did he mean that we should affirm the principle because we, through no fault of our own, were linked to all the others in the loud, clamoring semi-visible world, that world seen only as a fertile field for exploitation by Jack and his kind, and with condescension by Norton and his, who were tired of being the mere pawns in the futile game of "making history?" Had he seen that for these too we had to say "yes" to the principle, lest they turn upon us to destroy both it and us? (574-75)
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