The Struggle for Equality in the Face of White Supremacy in Ralph Ellison’s The Black Ball

Abstract

Racism in the United States of America originates in the colonial era and it continues to be a pertinent issue in the American society even today in the 21st century. Despite the enactment of laws against racial discriminations against African-American communities, racial segregation and injustice are still widespread in the US. “The Black Ball” is one of the four lyrical short stories of Ralph Waldo Ellison (1914-1994), the other being “Boy on a Train”, “Hymie’s Bull”, and “In a Strange Country”, which concern the issues of identity, racism, discrimination, and opposition stoking up  the struggle for equality. The racial discrimination is faced and its stigma is deeply experienced by John, an African-American, and his four year old son in the white dominated American society of the 1940s.   The reactions and responses of the two succeeding generations show how a father protects his son from realization of the crude facts of life in a racist society and the ugly side of the racial discriminations but there is also hope because of their struggle against racism and their emerging spirit of resistance against the white supremacy. This paper seeks to explore the different layers of racial discriminations as presented in this story.