I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids — and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Around this time last year I had settled into a new workout regimen. Twice a week I’d walk down to Brower Park at the intersection of Park Place and Brooklyn Avenue in Crown Heights and do my own circuit training routine amidst the gaggle of elder Caribbean women doing their calisthenics, troops of brothas jogging and doing pushups and pull-ups in the jungle gym. At first, I’d go at about 9am, a few hours after I woke up and had already completed some writing. As the summer heated up and 9am was already too humid to be exercising outdoors, I started going earlier. First 8am. Then 7am. And eventually 6:30am.

Once I started arriving at Brower by 6:45am I noticed that I was rarely the first one there—this was quite a surprise because this park had more people in it than my old CRUNCH gym at about the same time. I didn’t pay much attention to this at first, except maybe to use it as motivation to get in the park earlier. However, I soon discovered that regardless of how early I got to Brower in the morning, it was unlikely that I’d ever be the first person at the park. This is because after a few weeks it dawned on me that a few of the guys who were there early in the mornings weren’t necessarily there to work out, but the park benches that I was using for dips and inclined pushups were their beds.

There weren’t homeless men living in the park, but rather there were a group of young men, ranging from about 16-23 in age, who occasionally slept there and two in particular who immediately after waking up, commenced to do sit ups and pushups. I was trying to hide my expanding waistline; they were trying to hide the fact that this park was their bedroom.

I have thought a lot about the young men who I saw in the park last summer, and they have come to mind again as Crown Heights residents fight back against becoming ground zero for this city’s homeless male population. While I share my neighbor’s concerns about an onrush of homeless men in our “nabe,” as a black man and a scholar of African American studies, I can not help but be uncomfortable at times in conversations about this situation. Although, it’s not their blackness that concerns me, it’s their invisibility more to the point—it’s the way in which a movement to get homeless men (who are not all black) off our streets in Crown Heights echoes and runs in tandem with a similar movement to rid our streets of drug dealers and young men loitering on the corners (again who are not all black).

Sentimentality aside, recent statistics released by the labor department indicate that 627,000 people filed new unemployment claims last week. These numbers suggest that any concerns we have surrounding homelessness, affordable housing and job availability will persist well into the foreseeable future.

In terms of invisibility I am reminded by the last line of Ralph Ellison’s groundbreaking novel Invisible Man: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” Earlier the invisible man tells the reader that he’s invisible “simply because people refuse to see me—and indeed I think to a degree we refuse to see the young men loitering our streets and homeless men seeking to redeem themselves. Indeed we look at them, we know to keep our heads straight as we walk past them, or avoid certain blocks altogether. But do we see these men?

By seeing I am not appealing for any racial solidarity—rather I am looking for answers like if these young men are indeed sons of neighborhood residents, then why hasn’t someone claimed them? Why have city officials decided upon central Brooklyn as an outpost for New York’s homeless population?

Searching for answers to these questions are among the many reasons why I have such a profound appreciation for the work done by Angela Tucker in her series Invisible Men. Produced as part of the National Black Programming Consortium’s Black Male Project, Tuckers films give us a deeper look into the lives of homeless men than most of us are likely to receive otherwise. Her work amplifies the human struggles that these men are enduring—and reminds the viewer that like Ellison’s Invisible Man—that while they live on life’s lower frequencies these men may still be our most eloquent spokesmen.

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