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 50^th 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, limited—and 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”—because 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 1940—the 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 flux—producing 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 musicians—“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.