The Glass Teat, Chapter 21: ---

Chapter 21 of *The Glass Teat* sits at an odd angle to the rest of the book. Elsewhere, Ellison positions himself as the righteous outsider flaying television's cowardice — but here, reviewing a Diana Ross special and a drama called "The Black Answer," he keeps running into his own whiteness as an obstruction. He praises moments of authentic black cultural expression that break through the variety-show format, then catches himself praising them, aware that his approval is itself a species of the white liberal gatekeeping he's attacking. The chapter doesn't resolve this. It recommends "The Black Answer" while cataloguing its failures of nerve, and the reader is left with Ellison doing something rare for a polemicist: holding two positions simultaneously — that the work matters and that he may not be equipped to say why. Compare this to Chapter 30 (the Texas A&M piece), where he encounters overt racism and can be cleanly outraged. Chapter 21 is harder because the enemy is structural, ambient, and partially him.