This paper will argue that the primary expression of the traumatic experience that constitutes black American identity and its determination within the narrow orbit of white narrative is the affective experience of shame. Implicated in the racialized metaphysics of power relations that dominates Ellison’s world, shame foments the violence of internalized oppression and sets in motion contradictory desires that either move towards identification and mimicry or the self-valorizing practices of racial orthodoxy in nationalist movements. Both reproduce violence and reinforce the structures of invisibility that force black subjectivity underground. Shame, as the exposure of blackness under the white gaze, will here emerge as the contorted cry of history forced out of the violated, lashed, black body that haunts and conditions any perception of the present that would stabilize black identity. Using a range of discursive structures within which shame has been theorized, the paper will show its significance for our reading of invisibility in Ellison’s novel and its implications for the fact that race legislates for identity.