Earning a Scholarship
[The following is excerpted from the first chapter of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Aside from what is obvious regarding the continuation of this particular social "understanding" of the status of the Black American, I would offer that this is the primary perspective we operate within as members of an hierarchically managed society. The narrator is one who has beheld an incoherence. "All dreamers and sleepwalkers must pay the price, and even the invisible victim is responsible for the fate of all." I suppose it must be plain that I am trying to be more assertive with you regarding this incoherence. The school is an institution devoted to its continuation--masking the inequalities with rhetoric and absolutely zero reality to our assertions of it as a "commons." It may be compared to a field, but one of American cotton and tobacco, not unbounded wastes and borderless pasture shared in the service of common ends.]
I was considered an example of desirable conduct -- just as my grandfather had been. And what puzzled me was that the old man had defined it as treachery. When I was praised for my conduct I felt a guilt that in some way I was doing something that was really against the wishes of the white folks, that if they had understood they would have desired me to act just the opposite, that I should have been sulky and mean, and that that really would have been what they wanted, even though they were fooled and thought they wanted me to act as I did. It
I was considered an example of desirable conduct -- just as my grandfather had been. And what puzzled me was that the old man had defined it as treachery. When I was praised for my conduct I felt a guilt that in some way I was doing something that was really against the wishes of the white folks, that if they had understood they would have desired me to act just the opposite, that I should have been sulky and mean, and that that really would have been what they wanted, even though they were fooled and thought they wanted me to act as I did. It
