Racism Cause Effect the Invisible

Racism Cause Effect

The Invisible Causes of Racism in Higher Learning -- Culture's Divisive Impact Upon Black and White Minds Alike

On first glance, the realities of Blacks depicted by Lawrence Otis Graham seems to belie many of the common assumptions about Black students of America's past. In contrast to the racially fraught environment of Invisible Man, Graham suggests instead a different reality existed in the past of African-American educational history. This reality was not simply Black vs. White, or disempowered vs. empowered, but also was one of community member vs. fellow community member. In other words, Blacks could be torn ethnically and by class, and by their respective educational levels, as well as purely by skin color.

When noted by Lawrence Otis Graham how far the Black community still has 'to go,' one may first say that such a notion of distance could not seem be more contrary to the realities of both today and the world experienced by the 'talented tenth' of aristocratic Black students as depicted in the fiction work of Ellison's -- in contrast to today's far more integrated college life, Ralph Ellison's protagonist dwells in a place that is the province of whites, a white-run educational institution set up for Black students. Today's modern university supposedly stands apart from such racist constructions of the Black self and even Lawrence Otis Graham points out that long before the civil rights movement's push for integration, Blacks were able to rise and empower themselves within historically Black social and educational institutions.

But when Lawrence Otis Graham says how far 'we' have to go, he also means in terms of Black unity as well as Black social and economic advancement within a largely White-dominated society. Blacks must cast off such shackles of "Who I am," notions created by Whites, and create their own cultural terms of what constitutes a Black self, and not judge fellow Blacks by White cultural standards of excellence and class advancement. Only then will they truly have overcome the insidious effects of racism. Community empowerment, as chronicled by Graham has not always fanned out into the reaping of full economic dividends by the entire Black community, and quite often the so-called talented tenth remains simply that, an enclosed and educated tenth, rather than a way of creating full social enfranchisement for Blacks.

Also, selective scholarships and empowerment of some Blacks, in a world where most Blacks are still, continually not recognized as full citizens, can be divisive rather than empowering to a marginalized community. Even the forms of Black enfranchisement can be reinforcing of stereotypes. The experiences of the Invisible Man, who has been given a scholarship by the school not for the excellence of his mind, but more for the prowess of his body, show this invisible truth when the protagonists asked to perform before greedy whites in a pseudo-boxing match with his fellow Black scholarship students. Mere educational empowerment, whether motivated by the lower motives of Whites or the higher motives of select Blacks, is no all-inclusive solution to a culture that is permeated with racism.

Thus, both Ellison's fiction and Lawrence Otis Graham's nonfiction book suggests that often it is easy even for Blacks to be complicit in this institutionalized racism of education. Graham would also assert that the Black community still has a long way to go because, as part of the consumers of White culture (even when not fully participating in White culture) it is very easy to absorb White notions of what is acceptable or better in a way that disempowers other African-Americans.