Tag Archives: representation

A Writer’s Racial Block

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Representation in storytelling is relatively a new topic to get attention, and a lot of the conversation revolves around the most popular form of storytelling that we consume: film. A conversation sparked when the hashtag “OscarsSoWhite” trended nationwide because of the lack of racial diversity in the critically acclaimed films that were being celebrated at the awards show. It’s been five years since that happened, but has representation in the stories we tell actually gotten better? “On Whiteness and The Racial Imaginary” caused me to re-evaluate this through opening up my mind to the way race is viewed in the stories we consumed. As someone who not only loves to consume fictional stories in both film and literature, but also as a writer myself, it challenged me to think about the way white writers shape race, or even, the absence of the way they shape it.

It’s obvious that white writers may decide to ignore race in their stories instead of recognizing it because of not wanting to write characters outside of your own race. This is because one can fall in the line of thinking that it is not within your right to write a character that is outside of your own race. Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda beg writers to not ask the question of can they write outside of their race but ask, “Why and what for”. This forces the writer to consider more of the purpose of “inhabiting” a character outside of their race and what exactly they are trying to say by incorporating that into their story. This could exponentially help in not only increasing the representation of people of color in mainstream stories but in the type of representation that they receive.

Going back to cinema, a huge critique of the “OscarsSoWhite” movement was not just that only white stories were being told and celebrated but that in the way they were represented when they were. For example, many took note that stories that included black characters or tackled the subject of race, were frequently period pieces about slavery or just in general fell into a trope/stereotype of that race. It’s quite a dangerous pattern that writers of all types tend to fall down and this advice to more deeply examine the purpose of race in the stories we write can potentially help to stray writers away from this path. If there is one thing that is certain, it is that representation is needed and racial diversity has to exist in the stories we write and consume in order for them to represent our society’s reality.

When race is ignored completely, when white writers choose to ignore race and just write characters with an absence of race, they end up writing through a lens of white privilege, because it is a privilege of that white writer to ignore race in the first place. This is how we end up with stories upon stories that are not representing our diverse society and the racial complexities within it. What Rankine and Loffreda did in their essay is essentially map out a stepping stone for writer’s to open up their mind to the way they can represent race in stories. If writer’s take that step into asking themselves the same questions that is asked in the article, they will be opened up to much more deeper way of thinking of race in their writing and the effect could then be the proper representation that we have all been asking for.

 

Non-Political Women

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     Where do women fit into an organization called “The Brotherhood?” Though it isn’t hard to believe that women wouldn’t have positions of power in the Brotherhood, Invisible Man fails to represent politically active women at all, to the fault of author Ralph Ellison. The women The Invisible Man encounters in the Brotherhood are strangely disinterested in politics and overall negatively represented. 

     The Invisible Man has a troubling interaction with a white woman in the Brotherhood in Chapter 19. The novel states: 

Her problem… had to do with certain aspects of our ideology. ‘It’s rather involved, really,’ she said with concern, ‘and while I shouldn’t care to take up your time, I have a feeling that you –’ ‘Oh, not at all,’ I said. ‘But Brother, she said,’ ‘it’s really so late… my problem could wait until some other time…’ … ‘unless,’ she smiled, ‘I can induce you to stop by this evening (409-410).  

     The woman makes it seem like she’s interested in discussing the Brotherhood and having an intellectual conversation with The Invisible Man. However, she slyly offers to talk at her apartment which makes it obvious to the reader that she’s looking for sex. At the apartment, the two talk: “Please go on, tell me your ideas,’ she said… her hand light upon my arm. And I.. [was] carried away by my own enthusiasm and by the… wine… only when I turned [towards] her… I realized… she was leaning only a nose-tip away” (412-414). Every political topic the two discuss eventually leads back to the woman flirting with the Invisible Man. Ellison does not portray this woman as an authentically passionate member interested in discussing politics, but as a woman feigning political interest to lead a black Brother to her apartment for sex, which she accomplishes. 

     The next time The Invisible Man describes women in the Brotherhood is when female members find out about Tod Clifton’s death. Ellison writes, ‘‘Take me home,’ a girl screamed. ‘Take me home!’… I… caught her… ‘No, we can’t go home,” I said, ‘… We’ve got to fight’… One of the girls was still crying piteously” (448-449). The girls are stereotypically emotional about Clifton’s death. The screaming girl fits the “hysterical female” trope especially well. The girls, supposedly members of a political organization (The Brotherhood), appear to have no concern about what Clifton’s death means politically, unlike The Invisible Man who is calm, collected, and insightful about the situation. Though The Invisible Man later begins to question whether the best response to Clifton’s death is to be emotional or to only think about his death in a political context, the female members are still written unjustly. IM vaguely mentions that at the funeral, “There were tears and muffled sobs and many hard, red eyes” (451). However, these people are genderless. Ellison singles out the women when the despair surrounding Clifton’s death is discussed in more detail. These women are stereotypically emotional; their emotional despair is their only character trait. These youth members show no political intelligence or knowledge about the Brotherhood but are driven by their tears.  

     Ellison reduces female characters in the Brotherhood to either women controlled by their emotions or driven by sexual desire. Ellison doesn’t justly portray the large number of female activists in the early 20th century, especially when the novel takes place less than 20 years after women won the right to vote. He instead makes women out to be either too emotional or too sexual to be authentically concerned about political issues. Though Invisible Man fantastically covers the social complexities of being a black man in America, it’s essential to note the novel’s limitations. We can evaluate the novel critically by appreciating its strengths, accepting its flaws, and understanding that we can’t assume every sentence Ellison writes is credible.