To look at the paintings of Charles W. White is to see black America in the early 1900s through the lens of a social realist. African-American novelist Ralph Ellison stood behind men and women, like Charles White, who used art to express their personal opinions about their experiences of being black in America (Heritage Gallery). “Most social realists of the period were concerned less with tragedy than with injustice,” Ellison said during a 1955 interview published in the Paris Review. “I was not, and am not, primarily interested in injustice, but in art” (Chester 1955). As early as the late 1700s, blacks began narrating and writing autobiographies in an attempt to create “in words, a portrait of a human being” and to combat the derogatory images prevalent in American visual art forms (Gates 1990). With his most famous short stories titled "Battle Royal," Ellison brings social realism from art to pen and paper, reflecting on the conflicts of race, class, and gender that the narrator must grapple with as a "black man in America white". In the story, the narrator, a young black high school graduate, realizes that he is an “invisible man.” The tale recounts the strange events that led to this realization. Shortly toward the end of his graduation, the narrator is invited to give his graduation speech at a meeting in front of upper-class whites who also lived in his small Southern town. . Upon arriving, he and his classmates were unexpectedly involved in a WWE Smackdown-style fight against each other. Before the fight, a white exotic dancer dances closely in front of her classmates. The boys, filled with terror, are then blindfolded and forced to fight until only two of them remain. The narrator, who... in the center of the sheet... is an exotic dancing woman. As the woman danced in front of the white men and black boys, "some boys stood with their heads down, trembling," the narrator explained. (Meyer 279) This woman, as classless as she may seem, is still a “forbidden fruit” in the eyes of black men who held their heads down in shame and fear. Ellison uses social realism in this part of the story to bring to life the hierarchy of white men, women, and black men during that era. In conclusion, the story of "Battle Royal" embodies the issues of race, class and gender between white America and the black people who lived there and who spent much of their lives searching for their true identity. It is arguable that expressions of social realism are evident strictly in the artistic form, but Ellison's thoughtful use of dialogue, imagery, and perception paints a vivid picture of racial America during the 1930s and '40..