While it can be exhilarating to watch Ellison turn the light of his prose upon one of the United States’s most malignant delusions, the essay’s suggestion that those Americans systematically victimized for the perceived quantity of melanin in their skin must still, decades later, fight to stem the tide of the nation’s descent into “moral slobbism” and the myriad sufferings that attend it is a fact many wish weren’t true. But Ellison might say that to pretend otherwise would be a fantasy.