The ways that scholars have interpreted Invisible Man stem from firstly, the concerns of earlier generations of black communities who sought to move towards a future where black people have political influence and secondly, a problem within literary criticism, a field that has decided that novels must move beyond the black experience in order to be taken seriously. In one way or another, it seems that some of the critics of the 1960s and 1970s are responding to this decision, either denouncing Invisible Man or defending it. Some of the newer critics fall into this debate and end up defending the book with representational politics. However, at this moment our reading of the novel must change. For at this moment, when even the Civil Rights Movement has secured black political influence, when the Black Arts Movement has secured black pride, and when the Black Lives Matter Movement has sought to affirm what its predecessors took as a given, black people still face deadly racialized terror. This moment feels like the ditto of the archives, and it is this aspect of black life, constantly in danger, at risk, that Invisible Man reckons with. Yet, for all of its resonance with the past, this moment is distinct because progress has been interpreted as a decrease in risk. However, such a notion is false, and scholars like Christina Sharpe, Achille Mbembe, Saidiya Hartman, and others attest to this dangerous falsehood. Therefore, as we turn to black cultural production to guide us through a moment that feels so familiar but is perhaps even more dangerous, we need to consider what older methods of reading Invisible Man might have missed: Ellison’s concern with the racial terror that persists even after the gains of black politicians and intellectuals. Ellison takes black life seriously, life that encounters, survives, and moves beyond gratuitous violence. It is time to read Invisible Man through lenses that take up this living.