Invisible Man Essay Research Paper Paper

Invisible Man Essay, Research Paper

Paper #1: Invisible Man This paper will discuss the concepts of master status determining characteristics, stratification, and hierarchy in regard to Invisible Man, an autobiographical text written by Lawrence Otis Graham. He wrote about his experiences as a successful black lawyer posing as a busboy in an attempt to understand the all white country club society and why he is excluded from it. This paper will be organized in the following manner. First, I will give a summary of the article and the important interactions that occur in this situation. Second, I will analyze what characteristics determine the master status in this situation. Third, I will show how stratification contributes to enforcing the master status and the characteristics that determine it. Lastly, I will examine the hierarchy in this situation, especially the hierarchy of the employees of the country club. Analyzing this story in the context of these concepts helps the reader fully grasp the many interactions among the characters involved in this situation. At the time the article was written, Lawrence Otis Graham was a thirty-year-old black lawyer. He graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Law School. He worked for a corporate law firm in Manhattan, New York and had written eleven nonfiction books. Graham was raided in a well-off family. Much of his financial comfort came from the Memphis trucking firm owned by his grandparents. He grew up the only black kid on his high school tennis team, in his orchestra, and attending his Roman Catholic confirmation class. His wife was a successful black Harvard educated lawyer. Despite his many successes in life, Graham had often wondered why he could not join one of the several country clubs that were in the nearby town of Greenwich, Connecticut. To gain a first hand sense of the exclusive the country club scene, Graham created a new resume for himself and applied to work at eight such country clubs. He erased all his college degrees and portrayed himself to be a high school graduate who dropped out of college after two years. He also changed his age to 23 to be consistent with his college dropout story. Graham decided to target the eight country clubs in Greenwich as the subjects of his experiment. Over the phone the country clubs had told him that they were seeking waiters and that he would be perfect, but after meeting him for interviews, the clubs decided what they really needed were busboys. Graham finally settled on the Greenwich Country Club which boasts such members as a former president, hall of fame baseball players, big shot lawyers and many other executives and businessmen. The first day of work Graham’s supervisor, Mr. Ryan asked Graham to park in back, enter and exit through the back entrance. Graham is directed to work in the Men’s Grill, where women are not allowed except on Friday evenings. Women and children dine in the nearby Mixed Grill. Graham asks if men can eat there too and Ryan laughs and says, ” Of course they can, time and place restrictions apply only to women and kids.” Upon introduction to the serving staff Graham realizes that all the waiters are white and the rest of the staff is black or Hispanic. During their lunch break Carlos, one of the Hispanic busboys, takes Graham to the ” Monkey House.” This is the facility that the employees live and dine in. It is so named because the serving staff used to me completely black so club members named it so. During his first day Graham encounters several racist comments made in his presence, as if he were not there. When filling some iced teas, Larry overhears some older white men saying. ” These Negroes wouldn’t even be thinking about golf, they can’t afford to join a club anyway.” And later a middle aged white woman says. ” My goodness. Did you hear that. That busboy (Graham) has diction like an educated white person.” During the rest of his of his two weeks working at Greenwich Country Club, Graham encounters many discriminatory and racist practices. The most common of which is referring to ” the Negroes,” and ” the Mexicans.” The people in the country club commonly over-generalize about certain ethnic groups and make stereotypical comments. An example of this is conversation between a mother and her newly wed daughter, They are discussing housekeepers and the mother recommends to hire black housekeepers because “they can at least speak English, while you can’t trust either one of them.” Graham also discovered pollicies that were discriminatory against minorities. One such policy was the employee golf privileges. When Graham first heard about this he was quite surprised, but if turns out that that golf privileges were only extended to staff at the waiter level or above. This happed to be all the white employees and no minorities. Graham consistently observed discrimination and racism during his employment at Greenwich Country Club.Graham’s experience in Greenwich Country Club provides a perfect example of master status determining characteristics. Master status determining characteristics is defined by in Anderson’s Streetwise, “Some statues, in our society as in other, override all other statuses and have a certain priority. Race is one of these.” (P. 165) This basically means that some people attain certain privilege that comes with race. In the case of Anderson’s Streetwise, the privilege gained through race was respect via fear. However in Graham’s exp