(Unfortunately) visible man

In "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison, the narrator spends a great deal of his time with 'The Brotherhood' dealing with problems of race. However, after an extremely unfair interaction with the committee and Brother Wrestrum, he is moved downtown to deal with something that the Brotherhood calls "the woman question." This appears to be a feminist branch of the brotherhood in downtown Manhattan. However almost as soon as he enters this branch, a couple of things become abundantly clear to the reader. First of all the reader probably notices that the narrator is extraordinarily unqualified to work with feminists as he seems to have minimal interactions with women, let alone actual conversations or other things that would let him understand what feminism is. The reader will probably also notice how fake of a movement this feminist branch seems to be. Very little actually happens in terms of actual organization and the most important thing that happens (at least f...

As much as I usually dislike poetry, I've been finding the poems that people are choosing to read in class very powerful in a way that most poetry I've been forced to read in the past just wasn't. I felt like the poems have been more effective than the novels at expressing their protests. The poem I wanted to write about is "Walk Like Freedom" by Carolyn Rodgers. In the class discussion, people (I don't remember who sorry) brought up how carefree the white woman is in the poem and how entitled both white people are. The woman's carefreeness is shown by how she comments on the weather. As if the only thing she has to worry about is the weather. This shows her privilege as it shows that she is worrying about such small things. It also shows her privilege in that she feels entitled to better weather than there is currently. The man shows his entitlement when he says that "the train must not be late" as if the world should change for him and he is ...

The main characters in Invisible Man  and Native Son are both African Americans living in twentieth century America but they have very different perspectives and experiences in life. In Native Son, the main character, Bigger is brought up in an extremely impoverished environment. He only gets to go through eighth grade in school and had to spend the rest of his life with a gang and looking for work. Although we don't learn a whole lot about the narrator of Invisible Man , we do find out that he was the valedictorian of his class in high school and that he went through college. This means at the very least he is much more educated than Bigger. This is not an especially interesting realization, however to me at least it raises some questions about their attitudes towards life and specifically towards dealing with white people.  Bigger is a much more negative thinking person and is much more cynical than the invisible man, or at least at first. The invisible man's naivety is...