So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism [Paperback]

Ralph Ellison is a mythic author. He had a tremendous influence with his essays by imposing two changes in the American mood about the Blacks. First he managed to show and prove that the black slaves were victims of slavery for sure but that they also created, from recollection and from pure creation, a culture that remained clandestine for a long time and enabled them to save their psychological sanity in front of the horrendous fate that was theirs. Second he managed to show and prove that sociologists had a completely wrong picture of the Blacks in America, a negative picture characterized by wants and needs but nothing else, hence social cases that had to be dealt with politically. Instead he developed a positive picture of a rich community with ethics and a culture that had nothing to envy from other communities. What's more he showed how this black culture from gospels to jazz, from novels to poetry, from food to quilts, was an asset for the Blacks in general but also a tremendous incentive and asset for all Americans. Without Jim, the Negro, there would not be any Huckleberry Finn, hence no American novel, or definitely not the same thing. Ralph Ellison was also the author of two novels that demonstrated how culture is able to go beyond a particular situation and to reach universal grounds, because these two novels reached universality. He showed in these novels how an oppressed and exploited community, any ianywhere in the world, builds for themselves a culture that unifies them and how they can use many motivations to get together if they feel that culture and their community are endangered, and this beyond all differences and even antagonisms. This is extremely modern. He also shows how, if this mass of gathered people do not find a clear perspective, some minorities among them will get into violence. He shows symbolically how the invisible man, the nameless hero of the first novel, Invisible Man, escapes this rampage but to get locked up in a coal cellar that he transforms into his shelter. He installs hundreds of light bulbs and this white light in this black cellar illuminates the black man he is. He is finally seeable, but unseen, still invisible but potentially visible, because, though white and black can in no way be separated and have to be taken together, you need people who want to see you to be seen. In Juneteenth, the white racist senator reveals himself to be, after having been shot by some person who disagreed with his racism, a black man who used to be, in his teens, a black preacher. No matter how hard and much a white man negates his black roots, they always catch up. Culture is the force that unifies, is the melting pot in which dreams of the future can be invented, is the showcase of any minority that proves through it they are a lot better than what the bigots on the other side may say. But Warren's book misses most of this and speaks of anarchy and chaos in the present urban black neighborhoods, whereas Ellison would have spoken of « democratic diversity » because for him the black community has no future in the present times if it does not encourage differences and build itself from and around these differences, because the unifying culture has to be sufficiently multifarious to involve and lead everyone towards a dream of a better future : and the first quality of that better future will be, and has to be right now, the integration into wider communities, with all their particularities and their differences, so in no way an assimilation, a homogenizing process. Democracy and creativity require diversity and democracy demands, and this from all communities concerned, and in our present case from the Whites who are a community like all the others, that this diversity be cultivated and encouraged. Without forgetting that all damage has to be repaired (this is called reparations). Sorry for Mr Warren, but he missed the target, and by far.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

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