| Chapter Introduction: | Introduction to the Handbook on Prejudice |
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My third example is a literary author whose topic is racism. Ralph Ellison was an African American writer who dealt with racism in his famous novel, Invisible Man (1952),8 shortly before Allport published his groundbreaking book, The Nature of Prejudice (1954). As a writer, Ellison was aware of the fact that language, just like art, proverbs, or myths, can be a powerful instrument of stereotypes and prejudice by disguising immoral practices, hiding from view what one wishes not to see, and cementing existing social hierarchies. In an essay written in 1946 and published in 1953, he wrote, “For if the word has the power to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison and destroy” (1953, 24). Like Virginia Woolf, who leafed through the books written by male professors on women in the British Library, Ellison studied the image of the Negro in white American novels. What he discovered was “an image drained of humanity” (25). He found only narrow, reduced, and distorted images, or, in other words, caricatures and stereotypes:
And, like Virginia Woolf, Ellison reflected on the hidden motivation that drove the construction of these heterostereotypes. He saw in the contradictory stereotypes of the Negro not only a means to justify certain emotional and economic needs but also
He came to the conclusion that “the object of the stereotype is not so much to crush the Negro as to console the white man” (41), and he was