Angry With New Velocity

Colson's Whitehead's book The Intuitionist is not subtle, it is not a quiet book about a mousy elevator inspector: it is a racially-charged novel set in an absurd profession. Absurd because it is a government job that no one ever really thinks about: and to be honest with you, getting in an elevator is something that many people (including myself) would rather not over-analyze. Since beginning to read this novel I notice everything about elevators and continually think of them as coffins. So thank you Colson Whitehead.

But more than the brilliance with which Whitehead explores an entire new premise for a novel, he is able to ostracize a woman from a profession that is already part of the forgotten of government jobs. The look at Lila Mae and the profession itself is a fresh take on a racial topic, because the main character is not the stereotypical black woman readers would think of. In fact, to most she is the "moel minority." Lila Mae would be the perfect elevator inspector if she only wasn't an Intuitionist- the odds are truly stacked against her. And it is with elevator backdrop that the isolation of one black woman is made more pronounced in an America full of men with the "Safety" haircuts.

Whitehead is able to use the terminology of the White men's haircuts to play up the fact that nothing to about Lila Mae is safe: a woman, a colored woman they call her, an Intuitionist. But, she has overcome it all to become a professional- something that can't be said for her father, or for many black Americans surrounding her. And it is because Lila Mae is removed from the service jobs of most black Americans at the time that she is able to look at the subjugation with a fresh set of eyes for the reader- a new perspective at discrimination. She looks at the black porter: "But we take what jobs we get...Whatever we can scrabble for. She doesn't take to it, being waited on by colored people. This is wrong" (49). She doesn't look at the man in solidarity, she doesn't pity him. Instead she questions the system that put him there. What Lila Mae is able to do in her quiet and respectable defiance of the system is shed light on those who haven't gotten out of it yet. Her defiance and fight is quieter, an individual and solid fight. For she is a solid woman.

It is because of Lila Mae's solidarity that the reader roots for her because she has such odds. Like the counterweight of the elevator, Lila Mae is the counter-everything to the profession and white men that continually want to buck her for one reason or another. After part one, the stage has been set for Lila Mae to finally become enraged in her quiet way. Whitehead has set up the scene for a massive blowout between the Intuitionists and Empiricists, but more importantly he is setting this conflict as an example of a greater fight between progress and reactionism. Lila Mae is in the center of it, and I think she is ready finally to be "angry with new velocity" (33) in this fight for something new, something better. America should always be ready for a new face.