Ralph Ellison offers crucial insight into the meaning of conscientious citizenship in American democracy. In doing so, he follows his nineteenth-century Transcendentalist forebears—Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman—who have become key figures in contemporary efforts to theorize liberal democratic character. At the center of Emersonian ethics is the idea of “awakening.” “Awakening” is the Emersonians' name for honest and courageous confrontation with reality. Ellison broadens the Emersonians' vision by insisting that one cannot be “well awake” in America without confronting the ways historical white supremacy shapes one's identity and chances in life. Political theorists who draw inspiration from the Emersonians in theorizing democratic individuality need to pay attention to Ellison—for he demonstrates that one cannot achieve democratic individuality without awakening to race.
Ralph Ellison, "Hidden Name and Complex Fate: A Writer's Experience in the United States" (1964), in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison , ed. John F. Callahan ( New York: Modern Library, 1995), 208, 206. Unless otherwise noted, all references to Ellison's essays will be to this edition.
2.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Plato; or the Philosopher" in Representative Men (1850 ), in Emerson: Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), 646.
3.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, [ 1854] 2004), 98.
4.
Ellison, "Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity" (1946), 82.
5.
Ellison's analysis of race in America centers on the black-white binary; consequently, most of this essay's analysis does so as well. I believe that many of Ellison's insights are transferable to more complex configurations of racial domination, yet given limitations of space, elaborating that transferability will have to wait for another occasion.
6.
Ellison, "Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity," 88-99.
7.
See Lawrence Buell, Emerson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 259, 248; Peter S. Field, Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Making of a Democratic Intellectual (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), chap. 6; Michael Meyer, "Thoreau and Black Emigration," American Literature53, no. 3 ( 1981): 380-96; Jerome Loving, Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 230-32; David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Vintage, 1995), 463-74.
8.
George Kateb, "Democratic Individuality and the Meaning of Rights," in Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Nancy Rosenblum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 188.
9.
Kateb, The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 5.
10.
Ibid., passim; Kateb, Emerson and Self-Reliance, new ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, [1995] 2002); Kateb, Patriotism and Other Mistakes ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), esp. chaps. 2, 6, and 11; Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden, exp. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press [1981] 1992); Cavell, Emerson's Transcendental Etudes, ed. David Justin Hodge (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press , 2003); Cavell , Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). While "democratic individuality" is Kateb's preferred term for the determined pursuit of truth and autonomy in modern democracy, Cavell favors "Emersonian perfectionism." While Kateb and Cavell differ on certain elements in their descriptions of democratic individuality and Emersonian perfectionism, respectively, they essentially agree that modern democracy gave birth to a new kind of excellence-one which could dispense with social and political inequality, and was more excellent because of it-which Emerson described better than anyone. Because the similarities in their accounts outweigh the differences, I treat them as one. I opt for Kateb's term "democratic individuality" over Cavell's term "Emersonian perfectionism" because it is more general.
11.
Robert Gooding-Williams has waged this criticism against Cavell, and by implication, Kateb. Gooding-Williams, "Aesthetics and Receptivity: Kant, Nietzsche, Cavell, and Astaire," in The Claim to Community: Essays on Stanley Cavell and Political Philosophy, ed. Andrew Norris (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 261-62.
12.
On the idea of normative whiteness, see Cornel West, "Race and Modernity," in The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), 55-86; Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); and Mills, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
13.
Thomas L. Dumm , Cornel West, Jeffrey Stout, and Eddie S. Glaude Jr. have made a start at integrating the black Emersonians into the canon of democratic individuality, but none as deliberately and intricately as I do here. See Thomas L. Dumm, "Political Theory for Losers," in Vocations of Political Theory, ed. Jason A. Frank and John Tamborino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 145-65; West, Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism (New York: Penguin Press, 2004); Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Eddie S. Glaude Jr., In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), esp. 4-5.
14.
See Alan Nadel , Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988), chaps. 4 and 5; James M. Albrecht, "Saying Yes and Saying No: Individualist Ethics in Ellison, Burke, and Emerson," PMLA114, no. 1 (1999): 46-63; and Michael Magee, Emancipating Pragmatism: Emerson, Jazz, and Experimental Writing (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), chap. 3.
15.
While Ellison has attracted the attention of political theorists lately-most notably Danielle Allen in Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004)-none has emphasized how Ellison seeks to emancipate American moral vision from white supremacy to fulfill the Emersonian imperative to be awake to reality. Where my interpretation is indebted to other scholars I indicate in the footnotes.
16.
Kateb, Inner Ocean, 261.
17.
Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage [1952] 1995), 7.
18.
See Emerson, "Experience," in Essays: Second Series (1844) in Emerson: Essays and Lectures , 469-92.
19.
Ellison, Invisible Man , 256.
20.
Ibid., 13.
21.
Ibid.
22.
Ibid., 579. On public action's central importance in Ellison's imagination, see Ross Posnock, "Ralph Ellison, Hannah Arendt, and the Meaning of Politics," in The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison, ed. Ross Posnock (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 201-16.
23.
Ellison, Invisible Man , 507-08.
24.
Cf. Albrecht, "Saying Yes and Saying No," 55-57.
25.
Ellison, Invisible Man, 16. Cf. 15: "I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time been ashamed."
26.
Ibid., 574-75.
27.
See James Seaton , "Affirming the Principle," in Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope: A Political Companion to Invisible Man, ed. Lucas E. Morel (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 22-36; see also Gregg Crane, "Ralph Ellison's Constitutional Faith," in Cambridge Companion to Ellison , 104-20.
28.
Ellison, Invisible Man , 575.
29.
James Baldwin , "My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation" in The Fire Next Time (1963), in Baldwin: Collected Essays, ed. Toni Morrison ( New York: Library of America, 1998 ), 294.
30.
See Arnold Rampersad , Ralph Ellison: A Biography ( New York: Knopf, 2007), 385, 402, 444; Jerry Gafio Watts, Heroism and the Black Intellectual: Ralph Ellison, Politics, and Afro-American Intellectual Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 49.
31.
Ellison, " Brave Words for a Startling Occasion" (1953), 151.
32.
Ibid., 154.
33.
Ellison, " A Special Message to Subscribers" (1979), 351.
34.
On the role of metaphor in moral vision and imagination, see Mark Johnson, Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), chaps. 2 and 8.
35.
Lawrence Jackson, Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2002), 133, 182-86.
36.
Ellison does not fully explicate this account of the origins of white supremacy, but it is implicit in his claim that "the Founding Fathers' refusal to cleanse themselves [of slavery] was motivated by hierarchical status and economic interests." "Perspective of Literature" (1976), 775.
37.
See Ellison, " Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity," 81-99.
38.
Ellison, "Perspective of Literature," 776.
39.
Ellison, "Beating That Boy" (1945), 148-49.
40.
Ellison, "Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity," 85.
41.
Taking his cue from Ellison, Mills fully explains this process in The Racial Contract. My formulations here are indebted to Mills.
42.
Ellison, "Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity," 84.
43.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York : Library of America, [1835/40] 2004), II.i.2. For an interesting comparison of Tocqueville and Ellison-but one which, I think, goes too far in asserting a line of influence-see Pamela K. Jensen, "Ralph Ellison's Invisible Men," in Democracy's Literature: Politics and Fiction in America , ed. Patrick J. Deneen and Joseph Romance (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 130-32.
44.
Jackson, Ralph Ellison, 310, 430; Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 201.
45.
Erich H.Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Owl Books, [1941] 1994), 62-63.
46.
Ibid., 140.
47.
Ellison, Invisible Man, 572-73.
48.
Ellison touched on this theme in the posthumous Juneteenth ( 1999). The character Hickman thinks to himself "few men love the truth or even regard facts so dearly as to let either one upset their picture of the world." Juneteenth, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Vintage, 1999), 274.
49.
As Ellison noted in "Richard Wright's Blues" (1945, 139), "For the Negro there is relative safety as long as the impulse toward individuality is suppressed."
50.
Ellison, " What America Would Be Like Without Blacks" (1970), 582-83.
51.
Ellison, "Perspective of Literature," 779.
52.
Numerous American historians have substantiated this claim in detail. See Edmund S. Morgan , American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1999 ); Noel Ignatiev , How the Irish Became White ( New York: Routledge, 1995); and Matthew Frye Jacobson , Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
53.
Ellison, " An Extravagance of Laughter" (1985), 641.
54.
Beth Eddy, The Rites of Identity: The Religious Naturalism and Cultural Criticism of Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 133-38, 152.
55.
Ellison, "An Extravagance of Laughter," 641. Cf. Ellison's short story "A Party Down at the Square," in which one of the white characters characterizes participation in the lynching of a Negro as a rite of American nationality. Flying Home and Other Stories, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Vintage, 1996 ), 9.
56.
Ellison, "An Extravagance of Laughter," 641.
57.
Ibid., 640, 639.
58.
Cf. Jackson, Ralph Ellison, 329.
59.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate, trans. George J. Becker (New York: Schocken Books , [1948] 1995), 54.
60.
Ibid., 53.
61.
Ibid., 54. For an impressive Sartrean account of white supremacy, see Lewis R. Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999).
62.
Ellison, "Perspective of Literature," 779.
63.
Judith N. Shklar, The Faces of Injustice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). For some undeservedly understudied reflections by Shklar on the passive nature of racial injustice in the United States, see "Positive Liberty, Negative Liberty in the United States" (1980), trans. Stanley Hoffman, in Shklar, Redeeming American Political Thought, ed. Stanley Hoffman and Dennis F. Thompson (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1998), 111-26.
64.
For seminal reflections on the role of vision in political life, see Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, exp. ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 17-20. See also Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston : Beacon Press, 1995), and Joel Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 59-63.
65.
See Emerson, " Experience," 485.
66.
To borrow Magee's terminology, Ellison presupposes a "collaborating reader."Emancipating Pragmatism, chap. 2.
67.
Ellison, " What America Would Be Like Without Blacks," 580.
68.
Ibid., 581.
69.
Ibid., 583. Cf. Robert Gooding-Williams, "Race, Multiculturalism, and Democracy," Constellations5, no. 1 (1998): 28-29.
70.
Ellison's conception of America as a composite of Indian, European, and African elements fails to register Asian and Latino influences on American identity and culture. The latter he may have grouped clumsily under Indian, minimizing Latino culture's autonomous significance. While this is a significant weakness in Ellison's vision, his general conception of America as a genealogical and cultural mélange is adaptable to farther-reaching descriptions of American diversity. It is for the reader to judge whether the flexibility of Ellison's general model compensates for the lacunae in his portrait of American cultural precursors.
71.
Emerson, "The American Scholar" (1837), in Emerson: Essays and Lectures, 51-71.
72.
See Ellison, "Hidden Name and Complex Fate," 189-209.
73.
America's manyness in oneness and oneness in manyness is a motif in Ellison's writing. For examples, see Invisible Man, 577, and "Hidden Name and Complex Fate ," 207. The ability to sustain manyness in oneness, says Stephen Macedo, is an essential characteristic of liberal virtue: "The liberal personality thrives not on a harmonious inner life, but on both `internal' and `external' value plurality, and a consequent unease or dissatisfaction." Liberal Virtues: Citizenship, Virtue, and Community in Liberal Constitutionalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 239.
74.
Cf. Stout, Democracy and Tradition.
75.
Macedo, Liberal Virtues , 219.
76.
Ellison, " Going to the Territory," 598. Cf. Eddy, Rites of Identity, chap. 5.
77.
Ellison, " The Charlie Christian Story" (1958), 267.
78.
Chapter 8 of Juneteenth treats this theme brilliantly.
79.
Ellison, Invisible Man , 112.
80.
Allen offers striking meditations on unacknowledged benefactions and unreciprocated sacrifice in Talking to Strangers, chaps. 3, 4, 5, 8, and 9.
81.
Ellison, Juneteenth, 162-63.
82.
Ellison, "Hidden Name and Complex Fate," 193.
83.
Ellison, "Perspective of Literature," 777.
84.
Ellison, "Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity," 92.
85.
For a striking example, see Ellison, "Brave Words for a Startling Occasion," 154.
86.
Ellison, Invisible Man , 452.
87.
Ellison, Letter to Albert Murray, August 17, 1957, in Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, ed. Albert Murray and John F. Callahan ( New York: Modern Library, 2000), 175.
88.
Martin Luther King, Jr., "An Experiment in Love" (1958), in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James M. Washington (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1986), 19.
89.
See King, "Loving Your Enemies," in Strength to Love (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, [1963] 1981), chap. 5.
90.
Ellison, Invisible Man , 574.
91.
On forgiveness in Ellison, see Posnock "Ellison, Arendt, and the Meaning of Politics," 210-11.
92.
Kateb, Inner Ocean, 93.
93.
Kateb, Patriotism and Other Mistakes, 145.
94.
Emerson, Nature (1836), in Emerson: Essays and Lectures, 10.
95.
Kateb, Inner Ocean, 93-96; cf. Patriotism and Other Mistakes, 145: "The democratic aesthete aspires to be . . . the world's `complete lover.' But it is love at a distance; all is loved, and nothing is craved."
96.
On the essential relationship between love and perception, Emerson preceded both Ellison and Kateb: "The affirmative of affirmatives is love. As much love, so much perception." Emerson , Society and Solitude, new and rev. ed. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, [1870] 1889), 291. Cf. Kateb, Emerson and Self-Reliance, 50. Fromm's Escape from Freedom may also have influenced Ellison's view of the relationship between love and democracy. Fromm argued that love models, at a greater level of intimacy and intensity, ideal relations among democratic citizens. Love, he says, is a "passionate affirmation and active relatedness to the essence of a particular person . . . [a] union with another person on the basis of the independence and integrity of the two persons involved." Predicated on freedom and equality, love rules out asymmetrical power relationships; such relationships embody not affirmation of the beloved "as an incarnation of essentially human qualities," but lust for power on the part of the dominator and fear of aloneness on the part of the dominated. Asymmetrical power relationships are bound up with the escape from freedom, for they proceed from both parties' sense of insignificance and weakness. See Fromm, Escape from Freedom, 159-60, 115. A politics expressive of love, however, is a politics in which individuals try to achieve personal strength without making others systematically weak; its goal is a society free of domination. Such a society requires an awesome level of self-mastery in its individuals-for they must abjure the easiest way of achieving personal strength: the degradation of others. Yet achieving a sense of strength without degrading others is a worthwhile endeavor-for it gives the individual a sense of adequacy that no one can take away. In this sense, Ellison's call for a politics expressive of love is a call for the ultimate form of self-reliance: reliance on nobody but oneself for affirmation. For a beautiful meditation on love in Ellison's political thought, see John F. Callahan, "The Lingering Question of Personality and Nation in Invisible Man: `And could politics ever be an expression of love?'," in Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope, 218-29.
97.
Wilson Carey McWilliams, The Idea of Fraternity in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 18.
98.
Carole Pateman , The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988 ), 79-80, 114; Susan J. McWilliams, "The Brotherhood of Man(liness)," Perspectives on Political Science35, no. 4 (2006): 210-12.
99.
Ellison, Invisible Man , 112.
100.
bell hooks, "Black Women Intellectuals," in bell hooks and Cornel West, Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (Cambridge, MA: South End Press , 1991), 153.
101.
Ibid., 153-54.
102.
Tellingly, Ellison opposed the admission of women to New York's elite Century Club, of which he was a member. Arnold Rampersad writes, "The presence of women, he believed, would spoil the old fraternal spirit . . ." (emphasis mine). Ralph Ellison, 525. For other instances of Ellison's sexism, see 64, 362, 411, 488, 527, 547.
103.
Cf. Pateman, Sexual Contract, 102-103, 114.
104.
As George Shulman writes in a powerful meditation on Baldwin, "We are capable of a kind of re-creation, but only by recognizing our historical constitution, which robs history of the power that denial gives it." "Hope and American Politics," Raritan21, no. 3 (2002): 12.
