I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids--and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination indeed, everything except me.
- Invisible Man (prologue), Ralph Ellison
More than 50 years after Ralph Ellison's classic Invisible Man appeared, a black man may well be poised to become President, and yet, Black America as a whole still remains virtually invisible, describable in exactly the same terms that Ellison used:
I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination indeed, everything except me.
You make think this is an exaggeration. If so, this diary is a challenge to think again.
Let's cut right to the chase: This year, we can expect anti-affirmative action initiatives to placed on the ballot in certain key swing states with the intention of generating white backlash to defeat the Democratic candidate-particularly if that candidate is Barack Obama. Yet, at the same time, it's been shown that employers, on average, will hire white ex-felons more readily than they will hire similarly-qualified blacks with no prison record. The notion of hordes of Black workers taking jobs from more qualified Whites is sheer fantasy-the exact opposite of what happens every day of the week, all across America.
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