If It's Optic White, It's the Right White

The first page of chapter ten opens with the narrator of Invisible Man arriving at the paint plant where a large advertisement for the company stands in front of it: “Keep America Pure with Liberty Paints.” Sound familiar?

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The scene at Liberty Paints is a great example of Ellison’s ability to poke and prod at the absurdity of racial concepts and how deeply rooted they are in America. There are so many ways that it can be interpreted, but one I want to concentrate on most is how it represents this absurdity. 

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At first it doesn’t make much sense when the narrator is told to put ten drops of black “dope,” an additive to change color presumably (and also a word loaded with meaning itself), into the white paint. When looking at it through a satirical lens though, we can pinpoint what Ellison was trying to get at. As ten drops of black “dope” are dropped into the white paint, it makes it “whiter.” When a black person enters a room full of white people, the fact that there are two races in the room suddenly becomes apparent. There becomes a tension, an obvious ‘we vs. they.’ The white people’s traits stick out more as “white,” and the black person’s traits stick out more as “black,” therefore the white people are made to be even “whiter.” 

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Race is most often seen as blackness. However, race is both white and black, and every color in between. There is an insistence in the optic white scene that white is race. But no one is outside of race. The optic white scene provides a context for that tension that appears when race enters the room. 

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The opposite scenario produces the same results. When a white person enters a room full of black people, race once again becomes the most obvious differentiating factor. There being two races in the room is a fact. One has more melanin in their skin than the other; however, the concept of race is so deeply rooted in America that it creates an ‘other,’ and with that creation, blackness cannot be without whiteness and whiteness cannot be without blackness.

This was obvious in the ‘50s when Ellison wrote the novel, and it remains obvious today. As much as people wish to believe, the Civil Rights Movement did not eradicate this tension that fills the air when two different races, specifically black and white, are in a room together. 

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That’s where the Black Lives Matter movement comes in. It’s fighting the same tiresome notions of racial constructs that the Civil Rights Movement fought. 

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As the All Lives Matter campaign started, there was backlash because that’s not what Black Lives Matter is about. Like the black dope disappearing in the white paint, black people are hushed and made invisible by white people. Black Lives Matter is not trying to bring people of color up a level above white people; it is rather trying to level the playing field.

The optic white paint scene addresses this in a similar fashion. Lucius Brockway, a black man in charge of the boiler room at Liberty Paints, told the narrator, “‘Our white is so white you can paint a chunka coal and you’d have to crack it open with a sledge hammer to prove it wasn’t white clear through’” (217)! All Lives Matter is similar to Optic White, as it paints over blackness and makes it essentially invisible. The All Lives Matter campaign blots out the entire reason behind Black Lives Matter. The black community has faced systematic racism for hundreds of years, and movements like the Civil Rights Movement and BLM are trying to make their voices heard and become visible. 

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Ellison’s book, albeit being almost seventy years old, can help anyone to see the absurdity behind it all and how it continues today. Merriam-Webster’s definition of the absurd is “the state or condition in which human beings exist in an irrational and meaningless universe and in which human life has no ultimate meaning.” It is a perfect description of the state of being that the black community experiences because of racial constructs, as they cause an ‘otherness,’ a sense of invisibility amongst a white crowd.