Written Against Cultural Stagnation

Ralph Ellison  

Ralph Ellison won the National Book Award for his first novel Invisible Man (1952), the story of an alienated and isolated black man living in racially repressive urban America. He was reluctant to assume the role of a representative for his race, Ellison always maintained that in writing his book he was pursuing art more than he was pursuing racial justice. Best known as a novelist, he was also a scholar who taught at many of America's most prestigious colleges and universities and a literary and social critic who prodded America to recognize the humanity of its minorities.

No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe;
nor am i one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.
I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids-and I might even be said to posses a mind. 
I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass.
When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of   their imagination-indeed, everything and anything except me.      - Ralph Ellison

Some Day

Sweet Destiny
by Bernadette Watkins

Times Changeand we know 

that thingswill not ever  be the same again                                                               

But we are in it to win.

My work is a written orientation with few feelings evaded

for the sake of my sanity some feelings are not debated

They say “how can you have so much love, you don’t seem elated”

as if they know me inside and somehow they’re related

It’s safe to say when I found love I upgraded

that the ego in my heart got inflated

But see, the bones in some closets need to be excavated

because at the end of the day, I hope people were persuaded

to focus on the problem of why we are so degraded

when depicted, becoming the victims who willingly participated

The demeaning of our culture is being celebrated

The nation’s ignorance is being congratulated

That may be why my soft side is gated

all along they told me my thoughts were outdated

They say it’s no more power in the people, my words are wasted

in a generation where ignorance is not only bliss, but emulated.

THE CLOSING ARGUMENT>>>>