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“At first, I thought you were crazy, but now I can see you’re/your nuts.” - Austin Powers

While reading the Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, my perceptions and preconceptions of slavery and the lives following this – a century ago – were changed yet again. Unfortunately, these views were not for the better. Earlier in the novel, the narrator is involuntarily placed in a battle royal with fellow black men, blindfolded, and in front of a white American crowd. To amplify the humiliation further, these African American men, for the pleasure of the white Americans, are told that coins have been tossed on a rug, whereby they are free to capture them; unbeknownst to them, the carpet delivers electric shocks, and that the coins which they are brutally fighting each other for are fake.

This book was published in the middle of the 20th century, meaning that televisions, cinema, musical concerts, and other various forms of entertainment were accessible at the time. However, just as racist debates in this, the 21st century continue to happen, we, like the white American men finding pleasure in unnecessary, cruel violence, bring ourselves back to the time of slavery itself.

Following my reading of the battle royal, I had to put Ellison’s text down to digest what I just read. It wasn’t trying to visualize moving staircases in a magical school; it was not vampires fighting werewolves for the love of a mortal; and it most certainly was not a man dressing up like a bat to ward off criminals. This was something much more crude, raw, and unfortunately real. We have seen men put bulldogs and roosters in pens to fight, as well as snakes and mice. Humanity has come so far as to even put human beings inside of square, hexagonal, and octagonal rings to fight for the entertainment of others, as well as make a salary. However, the antics of the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), Total Nonstop Action (TNA) Wrestling, and the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) do not compare to the, dare I say, action of Invisible Man.

Having digested the grotesque scene, I believed to never have seen or heard of anything so barbaric before in my life. And yet, my brain triggered me to remember an Academy and Golden Globe Award winning film (both for Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor): Django Unchained. In the film, which depicts a freed slave living in a slave-filled America, we see this freed slave – Django (Jamie Foxx) – encounter an infamous slave-owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). During their first meeting, Candie is enjoying “mandingo fighting,” which consists of two African American men beating each other to a bloody pulp to the death for the entertainment and payment of their slave-owner.

If you are brave, or if you are a Quentin Tarantino fan, here is a link of the mandingo fighting scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpYuHlk3I5s

Thus, that is why I began my post with a quotation from Austin Powers in Goldmember, whereby at first, I thought that the white men that DiCaprio represents in Django Unchained are crazy for having African American slaves fight to the death, but then I realized that the Americans of the early 20th century were actually nuts in taking this away from the exaggerated cinema of Tarantino, and transforming it into a realer life.

Reading Ellison’s text truly made me question the sanity of human nature and its idea of racism. With all due respect, my frustrated expletives will not be unleashed at the UN-believability of what may be true history. Being that both Invisible Man and Django Unchained are works of entertainment, literature and film, respectively, I will give the American slave-owners and aristocrats the benefit of the doubt for not being that cruel to the African American people. With that said though, this history has not only been written by white Americans, but also the African American slaves and their descendants, making this history more true than we would hope to hear.

So, where do we go from here? First off, I’ll proudly say “Thank God” for the fact that this type of extensive slavery and treatment of the African Americans has subsided. Secondly, I will say that the fight is still being fought, and have no idea when it will end. Thirdly, I must ask “why” this is still happening. The North Pole and the South Pole are at opposite ends of Earth, coexisting in one planet. Is it because they are far apart that a war has not started between the two? Nevertheless, what Ellison’s text shows is that the African American men in the battle royal were treated like animals by the white American men, while simultaneously showing that it was the whites who were the real animals. The significance of this animalistic acknowledgement is for readers to take a step back and say, “Are we really like that? Have people really been like that? If so, that needs to stop right now and never happen again. If not, good; it needs to stay like that forever.” All we can hope for now is for more people to have this ideal mentality, and end this unnecessary fight – in the guise of Ellison’s battle royal, which never should have started to begin with – once and for all.