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Invisible desires: Homoerotic racism and its homophobic critique in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Spring 1997 by Daniel Y Kim
If Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man speaks to many readers of color, it is not only because the novel so eloquently records the feelings of rage and invisibility that are a consequence of living within a racist culture. It is also because this work gives voice to a particular intuition about the psychic motivations of white men: that they derive a specifically erotic gratification from their racist practices. It is this libidinal quality of white male racism-and specifically the erotic gratification derived from subordinating black men-which Ellison underscores in his novel. Through an attentive reading of several scenes from Invisible Man, this essay will bring into focus Ellison's account of white male racial psychology. In essence, Ellison's novel asserts that white men perceive and treat black men in roughly the same way that men characteristically perceive and treat women under patriarchy: as objects of erotic pleasure. By showing how white men consistently force black men to play a "feminine" role, moreover, Ellison attempts to explain a central feature of a view of the black race dominant at the time of his writing: a racial view that explicitly associated blackness with femininity. While I want to insist upon the importance of Ellison's far-ranging and subtle psychological account of white male racism, I also want to emphasize the presence of a disturbingly homophobic symbolism that undergirds it-for Ellison figures this homoerotically charged racial subordination, both directly and indirectly, as homosexuality.
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I. The Sociology of Robert E. Park: The "Negro" as "The Lady Among the Races"
Before turning to the novel itself, I want to call attention to a certain polemical impulse animating Ellison's literary project. Discussing his original motivations and aspirations as a writer, Ellison insists that he set out to challenge a "humiliating" view of the black race codified by the sociological work of Robert E. Park. Ellison recounts in his Introduction to Shadow and Act how he "had undergone, not too many months before taking the path which led to writing, the humiliation of being taught in a class in sociology at a Negro college (from Park and Burgess, the leading textbook in the field) that Negroes represented the lady of the races"' (xx). Ellison refers here to the Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1919), which was co-edited by Park and Ernest W. Burgess and which Ellison had read as a student at Tuskegee. (Reading this work apparently had such a disturbing effect on the young Ellison, that he still recalled it vividly nearly three decades later.)' The phrase that Ellison alludes to here was actually written by Park alone, and it comes from a passage of this textbook that purports to offer a scientific definition of the innate "racial temperament" of the "Negro."
The temperament of the Negro, as I conceive it, consists in a few elementary but distinctive characteristics, determined by physical organizations and transmitted biologically. These characteristics manifest themselves in a genial, sunny, and social disposition, in an interest and attachment to external, physical things rather than to subjective states and objects of introspection, in a disposition for expression rather than enterprise and action.... The Negro is, by natural disposition, neither an intellectual nor an idealist, like the Jew; nor a brooding introspective, like the East Indian; nor a pioneer and frontiersman, like the Anglo-Saxon. He is primarily an artist, loving life for its own sake. His metier is expression rather than action. He is, so to speak, the lady among the races. (138-39)
Park begins his account by simply enumerating the various qualities that define the racial temperament of blacks.2 In his attempt to underscore the "distinctive[ness]" of these characteristics, however, he deploys two rhetorical strategies that work at cross purposes. On the one hand, he suggests the existence of a continuum of racial types; on the other, he invokes a series of binary oppositions, drawing most importantly on the familiar binary of gender difference. The clash of these rhetorical strategies produces some logical dissonance that Park nonetheless attempts to resolve by privileging the second: he tends, in other words, to collapse his continuum of racial types into a crude binary. Indeed his typology of the various races and their elemental "characteristics" is actually presented as a series of asymmetrical oppositions. The Jew and the East Indian are both characterized by an interest and attachment "to subjective states and objects of introspection" and thus defined in contradistinction to the "Negro," who evinces an "interest and attachment to external, physical things." Similarly, though contradictorily, Park asserts that the Anglo-Saxon possesses a native tendency toward "enterprise and action" that distinguishes him from the "Negro," who is interested in "expression." In his concluding summation, moreover, Park subsumes these two asymmetrical binaries (physical/mental and expressive/active) under a third (feminine/masculine). By singling out the "Negro" as "the lady among the races," Park suggests that racial traits can be logically categorized as feminine (those that blacks possess) or masculine (those they lack). The apparently masculine interest in "subjective states and objects of introspection" that define the Jew and the East Indian are lacking not only in the "Negro," but also in the action-oriented Anglo-Saxon. The latter, however, retains a masculine identity as a "frontiersman" (emphasis added). Likewise, the masculine tendency toward "enterprise and action" is apparently no more visible in the Jew or the East Indian than it is in the "Negro," and yet Park identifies only one of these races as feminine. What these logical inconsistencies suggest is that Park's assertion of the natural femininity of the "Negro" is less a conclusion that follows from his argumentation than a pre-existing assumption.
