On The Lower Frequencies
Invisible Man, 70 years later
This project focuses on Invisible Man because the book stays relevant to me, years after I first read it. Written by Ralph Ellison in 1952, the novel details how racism is intertwined with education, economic and labor power, technology, personal relationships, sexuality, police interactions, and more. At its publishing, less than a century had passed since the abolition of slavery. In the face of massive, continuing racial inequity in American society, White Americans at all levels of power were concentrated on minimizing the public perception of racism by making it not less racist but less visible.
Today, that rings very true. The events of 2020, and the four years leading up to it, have forced many White Americans to grapple with the reality that racism and racial inequality are alive and well in our country. Rather than becoming particularly less virulent, racism has, in many ways, become harder to see: because American textbooks teach against it; because the fragile progress narratives of politicians call critical race theory anti-American; because “algorithmic populism” helps to create parallel, partisan digital universes with wildly different discourse about race in America (i.e. you and your uncle might live in different online worlds). In short, White America has been willing racism to be unseen rather than willing it to be undone.
That’s not by accident. It benefits politicians and people in power (mostly White people) to maintain the status quo, and that requires making people feel okay about the status quo. In other words, politicians and Fortune 100 members generally want to make racial inequality unseen. (Jeff Bezos will never come out and say that his company is disproportionately ruinous to Black workers, for example.) On the flip side, the traction of populism relies on discourse about race and difference, and its mass appeal relies on making that discourse palatable to as many people as possible. In other words, populists generally want to make racism unseen. (How many dog whistle hashtags can you think of? MAGA and All Lives Matter don’t even scratch the surface.)
The way we talk about race is essential to what people believe about it. Scholars like Beth Coleman, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, and Ruha Benjamin have written extensively about race as a form of technology: a tool that humans use to maintain power structures. Race has been defined with social purpose for centuries — the “one-drop” rule or the classification of early Italian-American immigrants as “non-White” are examples of race definitions that maintain social hierarchies using subjective or arbitrary race-based distinctions. It’s not too hard, in these cases, to see how race is the driving factor behind decisions to include or exclude a person or group.
But what have become more prevalent and more dangerous, throughout the 20th century and accelerating in the 21st century, are what Ruha Benjamin calls “upgrades” to the technology of racism: innovations that promote “a kind of racial minimalism that allows for more and more racist violence to be less and less discernible” (article here). Benjamin’s research examines physical technologies, like facial recognition software and pseudoscientific DNA testing for asylum seekers, that hide racial bias under the guise of objectivity. Alas, that’s definitely outside the realm of this project.
The “racial minimalism” she describes persists every day in our language, as well, though. Ibram X. Kendi wrote in 2018 about the form it has taken in modern political language since the mid-20th century:
A new vocabulary emerged, allowing users to evade admissions of racism. It still holds fast after all these years. The vocabulary list includes these: law and order. War on drugs. Model minority. Reverse discrimination. Race-neutral. Welfare queen. Handout. Tough on crime. Personal responsibility. Black-on-black crime. Achievement gap. No excuses. Race card. Colorblind. Post-racial. Illegal immigrant. Obamacare. War on Cops. Blue Lives Matter. All Lives Matter. Entitlements. Voter fraud. Economic anxiety.
All of these speak to the way in which a “race-blind” society fails to solve the problems of racism. It simply fails to see them.
Invisible Man makes the same arguments. The protagonist’s journey is all about uncovering the “racial minimalism” that masks racist violence: the underhanded Black college president who exploits the protagonist’s good will to maintain his own share of the “white-men’s power”; the pre-determined forces that prevent the protagonist from getting a job when he arrives in New York; the White-led Communist Party-esque far-Left group that (to his face) “doesn’t see race” but (in a too-loud whisper) hopes he is “Black enough” to help them expand their reach into Harlem.
The book makes visible the ways in which race is an upgrading technology — one used, at every turn, to deny the protagonist rights, humanity, subjectivity, livelihood, or happiness.
The book itself, though, is an anti-racist tool. And unlike many contemporary news or social media takes on anti-racism, it’s meant for slow, private consumption. It takes time to develop the plot, the characters, the thesis. It tackles an immense issue, and it’s not meant to be consumed in a single bite. I hope that bringing some level of interactivity helps to inspire people to read or revisit the novel, or could help a reader to connect the novel’s events and themes to our current world.
And so, my goal for this project was to make Invisible Man, and some of its ideas, more accessible. The book made these ideas accessible to me when I first read it, and has continued to motivate me to keep thinking and learning about race even as I contend with the fact that I’ll never fully understand what it means to be “invisible.”
I’m under no illusions that my very niche site is going to get much traffic, but even existing as a usable digital humanities project that centers the work of an African American writer is another step in the right direction. Out of 25 projects on Tufts University’s “Digital Humanities at Tufts & Beyond” website, for example, one is a digital archive of Who Speaks for the Negro? and one is a defunct link to a post-colonial literature project blog. The other 23 focus on literature written by White Americans and Europeans. NYU’s DH website links to one project on African American woman writers of the 19th century, while the other 32 links center White writers. Other universities’ Digital Humanities websites, if they have them, are similar.
Digital Humanities projects about and/or by BIPOC authors do exist (as do compelling arguments for why Black Digital Humanities is its own essential designation) but they’re largely still at the margins — whether because the projects aren’t “big enough” or simply aren’t publicized enough to make it onto mainstream academic forums like university department websites. This digital divide mirrors analog distinctions of who is in or out of the canon of English literature, or in or out of university tenure, where Black authors and Black faculty are also underrepresented.
The project isn’t done — partly, that’s because I’d like to send it to some educators who teach Invisible Man and see 1. if it’s a tool they would actually ever use or explore and 2. if there’s additional functionality or design I can add to make it more useful. It’s also not done because I’m still working on building out the existing information about the topic graph to give context to each topic, although that’s a delicate balance as I attempt to remain source-driven rather than thesis-driven. The end vision is a toggle that allows the user to opt in or out of an overlay of additional information.
Finally, I believe that technology is ideologically essential to this project. Part of combatting the upgrading technology of race and racism lies in making people more aware of it. There is no ctrl-F for racism, but we can get closer by remaining vigilant about understanding the ways it’s obfuscated in our everyday lives. Being able to interact digitally with Invisible Man — to search and compare — at least puts that power in the reader’s hands in this small corner of the internet.
So that’s the why for this project. Invisible Man remains all too relevant today. The more students who can be inspired to read it, or write about it, or use the text as a source for their own understanding of the world, the better. If they can think a little about the meta-technological argument of how On the Lower Frequencies seeks to make visible messages about race and racism as they’re using the site… *chef’s kiss*
