Sunday, September 22, 2013

Attention NC Teenagers: This Is What Racist Adults in Your State Don't Want You to Know about Ralph Ellison

Sixty years after winning the National Book Award for fiction in 1953, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man has been banned by school board members (Board Chair Tommy McDonald and members Tracy Boyles, Gary Cook, Matthew Lambeth and Gary Mason) in Randolph County, NC.  The decision ran counter to two review committee recommendations that considered the complaint against the book prior to passing the issue no the Board.

Here are a few of the quotes from GoodReads that may help to explain why NC's high rolling Tea Baggers would not want young people to be reading this dangerous book:

“Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.”
― Ralph EllisonInvisible Man
“What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?”
― Ralph EllisonInvisible Man
“I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I've tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied”
― Ralph EllisonInvisible Man
“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.”
― Ralph EllisonInvisible Man
“I remember that I'm invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.”
― Ralph EllisonInvisible Man
“And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own.”
― Ralph EllisonInvisible Man
“Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.”
― Ralph EllisonInvisible Man
“The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.”
― Ralph EllisonInvisible Man
“Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.”
― Ralph EllisonInvisible Man
“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”
― Ralph EllisonInvisible Man
“For, like almost everyone else in our country, I started out with my share of optimism. I believed in hard work and progress and action, but now, after first being 'for' society and then 'against' it, I assign myself no rank or any limit, and such an attitude is very much against the trend of the times. But my world has become one of infinite possibilities. What a phrase - still it's a good phrase and a good view of life, and a man shouldn't accept any other; that much I've learned underground. Until some gang succeeds in putting the world in a strait jacket, its definition is possibility.”
― Ralph EllisonInvisible Man
“I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.”
― Ralph EllisonInvisible Man
“I was pulled this way and that for longer than I can remember. And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself. So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man.”
― Ralph EllisonInvisible Man
“And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.”
― Ralph EllisonInvisible Man
“Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.”
― Ralph EllisonInvisible Man
“America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many.”
― Ralph EllisonInvisible Man
“I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.”
― Ralph EllisonInvisible Man
“I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie extoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.”
― Ralph EllisonInvisible Man
“Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.”
― Ralph EllisonInvisible Man
“Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn't now, I couldn't give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.”
― Ralph EllisonInvisible Man
“The truth is the light and the light is the truth.”
― Ralph EllisonInvisible Man
“Everywhere I've turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?”
― Ralph EllisonInvisible Man
“The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.”
― Ralph EllisonInvisible Man
“And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.”
― Ralph EllisonInvisible Man
“Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.”
― Ralph EllisonInvisible Man
“All it takes to get along in this here man's town is a little shit, grit, and mother-wit.”
― Ralph EllisonInvisible Man
“I felt that even when they were polite they hardly saw me, that they would have begged the pardon of Jack the Bear, never glancing his way if the bear happened to be walking along minding his business. It was confusing. I did not know if it was desirable or undesirable...”
― Ralph EllisonInvisible Man
“They could laugh at him but they couldn't ignore him”
― Ralph EllisonInvisible Man
“I'd like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing "What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue"-all at the same time. Sometimes now I listen to Louis while I have my favorite dessert of vanilla ice cream and sloe gin. I pour the red liquid over the white mound, watching it glisten and the vapor rising as Louis bends that military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound.”
― Ralph EllisonInvisible Man
“I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.”
― Ralph EllisonInvisible Man

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