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Lesson Plans: Using Film in the History Classroom
Essay on James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison
by Katie Glass
James Baldwin, in the closing of his essay Many Thousands Gone, as well as Ralph Ellison, in the epilogue of Invisible Man, both found in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1997), use an examination of distorted black identity to illustrate the destructive influence of white American's attempt to abolish black racial and cultural consciousness. Both writings argue that a better future does not lie in ignoring our differences for the sake of harmony, but rather claiming and using them to achieve greater equality, compassion, and humanity.
Both authors address the idea that even the victims of racial discrimination play a part in perpetuating the patterns of oppression that lead to despair and the loss of true identity. Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" states,
"You go along for years knowing something is wrong, and then suddenly you discover that you are as transparent as air. At first you tell yourself that it is all a dirty joke, or that it is due to the 'political situation.' But deep down you come to suspect that you're yourself to blame, and you stand naked and shivering before the millions of eyes who look through you unseeingly" (1537).
James Baldwin also addresses this idea when he says,
"For, let us join hands on the mountain as we may, the battle is elsewhere. It proceeds far from us in the heat and horror and pain of life itself where all men are betrayed by greed and guilt and blood-lust and where no one's hands are clean" (1670).
Both statements point out that in surrendering to white America's image of the African-American, formed through centuries of greed, guilt, and fear, African-Americans themselves contribute to their own pain and loss of cultural pride. In focusing on the political discrimination of American society, African Americans become detached from their own responsibility to look to themselves to discover their true self, and hold on to this true self even when society does not acknowledge its existence.
Ellison and Baldwin also both seek to dismiss the urge to create a race less society where all people conform to the same patterns. Ellison states,
"Now I know that all men are different and that all life is divided and that only in division is there true health…Whence all this passion towards conformity, anyway?-diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you will have no tyrant states….America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain" (1538).
Baldwin also comments on the error of conformity when he says,
"It is addressed to those among us of good will and it seems to say that, though there are whites and blacks among us who hate each other, we will not; there are those betrayed by guilt, by greed, by blood lust, but not we; we will set our faces against them and join hands and walk together into the dazzling future when there will be no white and black. This is the dream of all liberal men, a dream not at all dishonorable, but, nevertheless, a dream" (1670).
Both authors echo the belief that while the dream of complete conformity and integration at times can seem like the ideal state, this idea does not reflect the reality and richness of American life. It is apparent that Ellison and Baldwin both recognize that respect for diversity, and not conformity, is the real path to a strong, just nation.
In the closing of their writings, Ellison and Baldwin return to the examination of the distortion of black identity caused by society's failure to recognize black humanity, and black individuals failure to recognize their intrinsic value and the value of black culture. Baldwin comments on this when he says,
" …it's [our will to conform], examined, lead us back to our forebears, whose assumption it was that the black man, to become truly human and acceptable, must first become like us. This assumption, once accepted, the Negro in America can only acquiesce in the obliteration of his own personality, the distortion and debasement of his own experience, surrendering to those forces which reduce the person to anonymity, and which make themselves manifest all over the darkening world" (1670).
Ellison also expresses this when he says,
" Our fate is to become one, and yet many- This is not prophecy, but description. Thus one of the greatest jokes in the world is the spectacle of the whites busy escaping blackness and becoming blacker everyday, and the blacks striving towards whiteness, becoming quite dull and gray. None of us seems to know who he is or where he's going" (1538).
And thus both authors reveal the crisis of national and individual identity that results from attempting to deny the value and contribution that Black culture and experience can add to the soul of America. In whites denying black humanity, and blacks surrendering to this denial, entire society is darkened.
Ellison and Baldwin echo each other as they examine the affects of forced conformity to white culture on black identity. While recognizing that Blacks themselves are partly to blame for the loss of true self image, the authors argue that when society recognizes and celebrates diversity it can finally begin to progress.
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