Invisible Desires: Homoerotic Racism and Its Homophobic Critique in Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man"

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If Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man speaks to many readers of color, it is not only because the novel so eloquently records the feelings of rage and invisibility that are a consequence of living within a racist culture. It is also because this work gives voice to a particular intuition about the psychic motivations of white men: that they derive a specifically erotic gratification from their racist practices. It is this libidinal quality of white male racism-and specifically the erotic gratification derived from subordinating black men-which Ellison underscores in his novel. Through an attentive reading of several scenes from Invisible Man, this essay will bring into focus Ellison's account of white male racial psychology. In essence, Ellison's novel asserts that white men perceive and treat black men in roughly the same way that men characteristically perceive and treat women under patriarchy: as objects of erotic pleasure. By showing how white men consistently force black men to play a feminine role, moreover, Ellison attempts to explain a central feature of a view of the black race dominant at the time of his writing: a racial view that explicitly associated blackness with femininity. While I want to insist upon the importance of Ellison's far-ranging and subtle psychological account of white male racism, I also want to emphasize the presence of a disturbingly homophobic symbolism that undergirds it-for Ellison figures this homoerotically charged racial subordination, both directly and indirectly, as homosexuality.