This essay compares how race is experienced and negotiated in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Angie Thomas's The Hate U Give. Through close reading of both novels, the paper examines how each protagonist navigates racial identity within an unjust social system, resists externally imposed definitions, and contends with violence from both white institutions and within the Black community. The essay argues that while both characters face oppression, their different historical contexts, support systems, and strategies of resistance lead to opposing outcomes: the Invisible Man retreats underground in self-erasure, while Starr emerges as an activist voice in the tradition of Black empowerment. Gender, generation, and access to community are identified as key factors shaping each character's experience of race.
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Angie Thomas's The Hate U Give are two very different novels about race. Ellison's novel is mainly pessimistic — though realistically so — while Thomas's young adult novel is more optimistic and positive. Both portray the African American experience, including violence, bloodshed, hatred, and racism, but each takes a different path to and from the subject and arrives at a distinct position in the end. Ellison's narrator goes underground and embraces his "invisibility" after finding no place for himself among either the white or the Black population in the city. Thomas's Starr becomes an activist, successfully defends her father's shop from the local gang leader, and helps to bring the truth to light about the killing of a friend by the police.
While being Black means similar things for both main characters, each is approaching the problem from a different time and generation. Ellison's narrator is caught in a time before the Civil Rights Movement, a time when Jim Crow still existed and segregation was law. Starr is confronting the problem of race and racism at a time when Black Lives Matter has emerged and social media is an effective tool for rallying people and spreading information quickly and easily. Black Americans are less hampered by legal injustice in Starr's day than in the Invisible Man's, though this does not mean that racism has been overcome — Starr's experience makes clear that struggles persist everywhere. That shared reality is something the two novels have in common: both main characters must fight battles within their own communities against people of their own race, while also fighting the white establishment.
This essay discusses how race is experienced by the two main characters, how they negotiate their identity in terms of race, how they resist social definitions and constrictions of race and identity, and how the common theme of struggle is present in both novels.
The narrator in Invisible Man experiences race in negative ways throughout his story. He is from the South, and first he must take part in a Battle Royal in order to be awarded a college scholarship by the white elites. The experience is humiliating, but he participates anyway. Once at college, one of the white elites asks the narrator to show him the underbelly of Black society — and they both end up being assaulted. The narrator is expelled from college and tricked into rejection at every turn by phony letters of recommendation written by the white president of the college, who offers to "help" the narrator in order to keep him quiet about the expulsion. The young man's city life is no better: Blacks and whites are at odds, but Blacks and other Blacks are also at odds. The narrator moves from one violent episode to the next, attempting to rally the community to stand up against their oppressors, yet at every turn he is chased down, beaten, and eventually driven underground.
In The Hate U Give, the young girl Starr belongs to two communities — the inner city where her Black family lives and the upper-class world where whites predominate. She attends a white school, but her father's shop is in the inner city, so she has a foot in both worlds. When her Black friend Khalil is killed by a police officer right in front of her, the collision of these two worlds begins. Yet the same intra-community struggles appear here as well: a Black gang leader oppresses other Black residents, mirroring the way whites oppress Blacks elsewhere in the city. There is no justice where the oppressed do not stand up for themselves. Unlike the Invisible Man, Starr ultimately gains support from within her community, and her experience of race turns out to be far more positive than that of Ellison's narrator.
What it means to be Black in these contexts is also shaped by gender. Starr is a sixteen-year-old girl, while the Invisible Man is a young man. They are separated by more than half a century of racial struggle, conflict, and change. Starr has access to technologies and social spaces that the Invisible Man does not. For Ellison's narrator, being Black means becoming invisible. For Starr, being Black means standing up and becoming visible. Starr radiates self-empowerment; Ellison's narrator disappears into self-abnegation and contempt. Though both experience oppression within an unjust, racist system, they have very different support systems, and that difference is decisive. Starr has familial support. The Invisible Man has no one and is, in the most literal sense, alone.
"Characters define race on their own terms"
"Tactics for refusing racial stereotyping"
Thomas, A. (2017). The hate u give. NY: HarperCollins.
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