Conclusion: Ellison, Obama and Post-Race Politics in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

In 1995 Ralph Ellison seemed outdated. Richard Bernstein opens his 1995 review of Ralph Ellison’s collected essays expressing shame that Ellison had “faded from the public mind, occupying what might be called a highly respected position on the sidelines of the general consciousness” (Bernstein, “Black Identity, Racism and a Lifetime of Reflection”). In light of our current political circumstances Bernstein’s reasons for Ellison’s irrelevance are very telling. Ellison, Bernstein writes, had faded from the public mind because he was an “integrationist in his very marrow and in these times of intense identity politics and multiculturalism that puts him outside the contemporary trendy mainstream” (Bernstein, “Black Identity, Racism and a Lifetime of Reflection”). In the four years leading up to Ellison’s death the USA was also at the height of the so-called Culture Wars and the critical reception of his work was and continues to be greatly influenced by that bellicose state of affairs. These concerns were clearly on Bernstein’s mind as he wrote his review for the New York Times. Bernstein, who in 1994 published Dictatorship of Virtue: How the Battle Over Multiculturalism Is Reshaping Our Schools, Our Country and Our Lives, a broadside against multiculturalist public policy and corporate hiring practices, welded Ellison’s work as a sacred talisman against the errant virtues of the times.

I know, and that’s exactly why I’m calling on you for an answer! I know you’re strangers, but since you’ve shown up in the middle of the night and at a time when all this trouble’s upon us you must have been sent here for a purpose …

-Ralph Ellison, Three Days Before the Shooting

There had been a long preparation for the writing career! And then I discovered that to be a writer was not (as I had imagined) a state — of competence, or achievement, or fame, or content — at which one arrived and where one stayed.

-V.S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival