But the pain of poverty is felt more often as a loss of dignity: as Smith notes, the poor man’s situation “places him out of sight of mankind,” such that they have no fellow feeling for him. This was the basic insight of Ralph Ellison’s classic novel, Invisible Man, about a black man moving from the American South to Harlem. The real indignity of racism in the North was that African-Americans were invisible to their white peers, not necessarily mistreated but simply not seen as fellow human beings.
