INTRODUCTION
Information Background
Half a century back, in the prologue of his novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
(1952) narrated, “I am an invisible man…I am invisible, understand, simply because
people refuse to see me.” Since then, “invisible man” has become a metaphor signifying
the situation that persons of color, those negatively constructed group members’
experience. Invisibility equates with voicelessness, being neglected, and silence within a
mainstream culture.
Some social change has occurred since the Civil Rights movement, and co-
cultural group members’ conditions in American society have improved compared with
the time when institutional racism distinguished a clear racial line between “white” and
“colored.” Within regulation of federal government laws, organized, institutional racism
almost disappeared. However, co-cultural group members still experience discrimination
in their lives. The difference now is that discrimination mostly takes subtle forms,
making the fight with racism a more difficult task. Invisibility is such a subtle form of
racism, it is not merely one ethnic group’s experience, rather, it describes the partial
reality that various co-cultural group members face today. Reports from different co-
cultural groups confirm the currency of the notion of minority invisibility: “a great many
blacks” continue to think of themselves as victims of racism, inhabitants of “a
fundamentally hostile, alien nation” (McWhorter, 2000, p. 213); African American men
have been stereotyped throughout their everyday life experiences (Brown, 1965; Ellison,
1947; Orbe et al, 2000; Wright, 1966). Invisibility in dominant white culture has
challenged the African American male’s self-affirmation and caused psychological
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Convention