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...
As society remains divided by class, appearance, educational levels, regional differences, and cultural nuances, in addition to race, racism will affect Blacks from such different spheres in different ways -- and cause different levels of opportunities and instigate potential conflicts. Until greater awareness is given to this fact, society will remain still segregated and closed-minded because of these often assumptions, with deleterious economic and cultural effects upon those in the Black community, and the cohesiveness of African-Americans in the nation as a whole.
Works Cited
Graham, Lawrence Otis. Our Kind of People.2001.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. 1952.
