![]() When you are a member of a marginalized community, it is easy to feel at once the indifference, casual or studied, of the world passing by, and, too, the way you can never quite blend in, for you become visible precisely at the moment you break societal rank, the moment you step where your class is not supposed to. The way so many aspects of how and why we mistreat each other are woven, be the threads great or gossamer. The way hyper-visibility can, seamlessly, become invisibility. ![]() I felt that interconnectedness both as someone who could straddle racial lines due to the indeterminate olive-brown of my skin and as a trans woman. It wasn’t just that Ellison was a brilliant stylist, with an obsessive but efficacious eye for showing, through those repeating mirrors, America’s wondrous and terrible symmetries, how blackness was inextricably intertwined with almost every facet of American history, as he would venture into more detail in an essay for TIME, in which he argued, rightly, that America would be unthinkable without black people, despite the quixotic fantasies of certain white Americans. The title, in its semblance to Wells’ fantastical novel, captured a country’s contradictions. An invisible-visible woman, a trans woman with a foot in two countries, two shifting realities. ![]() When I reread it, I still felt that pull of someone who yearns to solve a labyrinth, but I also saw myself, more clearly, in it: I understood its contours in a deeper way, the way one can at once be forgotten and feared by a society, invisible and incandescent, hated either way. The first time I read Invisible Man, I was entranced by its black-white symbolism, which seemed to never end, but instead simply became smaller and subtler, like a reflection in an elevator’s facing mirrors.
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