Dear Brother Jack,
From your first meeting with the narrator over that piece of cheesecake, I was already quite skeptical over your interests in getting your organization involved in the issues surrounding the African-American community in Harlem. But your conduct in the recent chapters (21 and 22, sorry for any spoilers!) has shown the true shades of your organization and your need to protect yourself from the true realities of race in America. I have a few grievances to address, so here we go.
1. Your need to ignore the experience of individuals by bottling them up into groups and questions. I don't even think you care that much about the struggles of African-Americans and women; quite frankly, I think working with African Americans and women helps you check off a box and say that your organization has addressed an issue. However, the struggles of every individual is so distinct from another - even if they're the same race or gender! Although discrimination is a common experience for a lot of people during the 30s, these problems cannot be solved just by addressing the 'Race Question' or the 'Woman Question'. This brings me to my second point.
2. Your 'scientific' approach to everything. Why can we not arouse the emotions of people and address wrongs committed to members of our community, no matter what era they're from or whether or not they're 'proper'? This is related to your need to categorize people - applying one scientific method to an entire community, without ever experiencing what it even means to be part of their experience. You want to insert your organization to get clout in all the issues happening around town without attempting to understand what you're getting yourself into.
3. "You're riding 'race' again." (469) Yeah, why does everyone have to talk about race? Why can't we just acknowledge it and move on? Why can't everything be simple like that?😱😱😱No, it can't. This is related to the Brotherhood's need to ignore history and this is because of their privilege as mostly white men - they have the luxury of ignoring history and moving past it. In order to move beyond history, you have to acknowledge it and try to undo wrongs done. This quote by James Baldwin sums it up pretty well - 'People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.' If we want to break free of something, we have to learn from it or else we're bound to repeat it. The Brotherhood is blinded to the reality of race and class and gender in the United States but they try to dictate what the discourse around it should be.
Sincerely,
A Reader
Hi Janaki, this was a really good blog! I love the way you structured the article, writing it as if it were a letter to the Brotherhood. You also make some great points about how applying one scientific method to the oppression of an entire community can be problematic. This was really well written, good job!
ReplyDeleteGreat post! I really like how you formatted your blog as a letter to Brother Jack. It is very engaging and makes a lot of sense. I like how you described intersectionality in point 1 without using the actual word. It is historically acccurate because a reader at the time this book was published, wouldn't be familiar with the term.
ReplyDeleteThe "scientific" approach to the complex and messy realities of human life ends up becoming one of Ellison's main complaints about the Brotherhood (and, by extension, a lot of social and political theory)--the narrator comes to a point where he sees all that the Brotherhood's "science" misses, figured initially in the zoot-suiters he meets in the subway after Clifton's shooting. Human culture is diverse and unpredictable and creative, according to Ellison, and it can't adequately be contained within a specific theoretical framework. The Brotherhood has nothing to say about these teenagers with their comic books and flashy suits, but the narrator starts to wonder if they in fact represent the "true history of the times"--culture as a "gambler" rather than a "scientist."
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