"Thus on the moral level I propose that we view the whole of American life as a drama acted out upon..."

“Thus on the moral level I propose that we view the whole of American life as a drama acted out upon the body of a Negro giant, who, lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and the scene upon which the action unfolds. If we examine the beginnings of the Colonies the application of this view is not in its economic connotations at least too far-fetched or too difficult to see. For then the Negro’s body was exploited as amorally as the soil and climate. It was later, when men drew up a plan for a democratic way of life, that the Negro began to exert an influence upon America’s moral consciousness. Gradually he was recognized as the human factor placed outside the democratic master plan, a human natural resource who, so that the white man could become more human, was elected to undergo a process of institutionalized dehumanization.”

- Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act