The third paragraph of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man starts with the following lines:
One night, I accidentally bumped into a man, and perhaps because of the near darkness he saw me and called me an insulting name. I sprang at him, seized his coat lapels and demanded that he apologize. He was a tall blond man, and as my face came close to his he looked insolently out of his blue eyes and cursed me, his breath hot in my face as he struggled.
I asked my junior English class how they could be pretty sure, even if they hadn’t known before, that the speaker was not white. We got into a great discussion about how people talk and think, how they characterize others normally by differences rather than similarities. One girl simply did not believe me that if a white guy bumps hard into another white guy in the hallway of the school, he will not tell his buddies “I bumped into a white guy last period.” I told her to listen around her all next week and see for herself. (We did get into the side note of he might express himself that way if there weren’t many whites around so that even though he was white, being white was the “difference.”)
From there, we went into a broad discussion of stereotyping and prejudice, the root of prejudice (“pre-judging”), what can be done about it, and so on. Really good class, but not as much time spent on rhetorical devices as I originally intended…
At one point, I asked the girl who hadn’t believed me about the “white guy” comment something, and she apologized for having spoken up before. I told her that I didn’t want her to apologize, that she should critique everything she heard me say in class, that I was not trying to get her to be quiet, quite the opposite—I wanted her to go see for herself. I ended with that sentiment: “I want you to think for yourselves and come to your own judgments about things. If you end up the year learning to do that, it will be much more valuable than anything else you get out of the course.” I’m not at all sure she believed me. But I have most of a year to try to convince her otherwise.