Jess Mowry's novel Way Past Cool focuses on young Oakland, California gang members with compassion and insight. It's a violent, compelling and sad picture of gang culture which depicts 12 and 13-year-old boys who are coming of age under the most dire circumstances. This paper will discuss the novel's major characters and their cultural conflicts as well as how invisibility is reinforced. In Ralph Ellison's 1962 novel The Invisible Man, the author uses the title of his book to emphasize the struggle of African-Americans for identity in White America. The title of Ellison's book suggests that what the power structure sees in Blacks, especially poor Blacks, is what they want to see, and therefore Blacks are invisible because people refuse to see them. "When they approach me they see only my surroundings themselves, or figments of their imagination-indeed everything and anything except me" (Ellison 2).
An early scene in Mowry's novel between gang members called The Friends and Oakland police bear this out. When two policemen, one white and one black, see the young boys, they visualize guns, knives and violent acts although the kids are just standing on the sidewalk.
The scene...would have looked bogus on network TV, like a parody of something from a long time ago. The black cop...tore into the backpacks like a gorilla who smelled a banana. He seemed about as disappointed when he didn't find one (Mowry 17).
The basic plot of the novel is how a local, successful drug-
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