Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man’ Is About More Than We Thought, As A High School Teacher Learns

Clint Smith: “My classroom was filled with almost exclusively black and brown students, many of them undocumented immigrants. While Ellison wrote of invisibility as a black man caught in the discord of early-twentieth-century racism, this particular group of students read the idea of invisibility not as a metaphor but as a necessity, a way of insuring one’s protection.”