White Men Above All the Rest?

Ralph Ellison speaks primarily to any young African-American in his novel Invisible Man but he also relates those African-American to females. He chronicles the experiences of a young, black male in the 1920s and the 1930s. In this time, blacks were not treated with any amount of respect and were often looked down upon. Even American, black, citizens could not vote. I, myself, as a young, white, female can not fully comprehend what they were going through but I began to understand the humiliation during the Battle Royal in Invisible Man. The Invisible man’s public speaking skills result in an invitation to speak to a group of a wealthy, white men. When he arrives, he is informed that he must participate in a battle royal with other young, black men. The boys are forced into the ring. In the center of the ring stands a beautiful, blonde, white woman. She is completely naked and the boys try to avert their eyes from her, until she begins to dance. The invisible man notices a “certain merchant who followed her hungrily, his lips loose and drooling." The woman is now  presented as an object. The men outside the ring are looking at her as a sexual object and not a woman. She becomes humiliated when the men being to reach out to touch her. Soon, she runs for the door and the invisible man describes the men as “they caught her just as she reached the door, raised her from the floor, and tossed her as college boys are tossed at a hazing, and above her red, fixed-smiling lips and disgust in her eyes, almost like my own terror." This shows the correspondence between the naked woman and the invisible man. They both feel the same terror from the men watching them. At the same time that African Americans were being treated as inferior, women were also being treated as inferiors and more of an object than a person. Women were not suppose to go to college and could certainly not hold the same jobs as the men. While many things have changed, and arguably "progressed," since the 1920's and 1930's some things will always be present and the treatment of African-Americans and women are no exception. Take, for example, the fact that in 2014, a study showed  female full-time workers made only 79 cents for every dollar earned by men, a gender wage gap of 21 percent. African- American males made only 74 cents for every dollar a white male earns. How is this all fair? It's not! This is something that we, as Americans, have the power to change. We need to close the gap between gender and ethnicity. No one is inferior to another man, solely different from them.