Fifty Shades of White

Until his expulsion, the narrator has, for the most part, only known opportunities to come in the form of rewards for pleasing and obeying white folks. In fact, the university he was enrolled in takes tremendous pride in its administering of this philosophy. It is a Southern academy that “domesticates” its black students, teaching them that by remaining subservient and embracing white culture, they are advancing in society. This strategy not only successfully reinforces white dominance and masks black identity, but it potentially yields members of society that will act whiter. Having been an apprentice to this process, it is only appropriate that the sole place of employment the narrator is able to find in the North is a paint business that only makes white paint. He is now directly responsible for what he has been inadvertently expediting his entire life: “keeping America pure.”

The word “liberty” holds such a clout in this country that “we’ve practically trademarked it" (Mitchell, 2014)! We Americans prefer to think that our nation was founded on the tenet of freedom, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Whiteness could never maintain its reputation of “liberty” and “purity” without oppressing blackness. Case in point: the United States would be nothing without its most reprehensible institution, slavery; black men and women worked too long and too hard throughout American history to deserve this discredit. Likewise, Liberty Paint’s most popular hue, Optic White claims to be “so white you can paint a chunka coal and you’d have to crack it open with a sledgehammer to prove it wasn’t white clear through,” yet as the narrator learns, the brilliant white paint cannot be made without its secret ingredient: a few drops of black varnish. This metaphor becomes even deeper when we discover the character of Lucius Brockway, the old comical black employee hidden away in the factory basement. “Right down here is where the real paint is made. Without what I do [the people upstairs] couldn’t do nothing, they be making bricks without straw.” While Brockway has been at the company since its launch and recognizes his own indispensability, he fails to see the role he actually plays. He is from an older generation, old enough to have tasted the vestiges of the slavery era; the consequence is that his subordination toward whites is voluntary and genuine. Brockway is only concerned with his position within the company and not with his position within the system. Indeed, his strategy for upward mobility sounds like a less eloquent version of Booker T. Washington’s ideology about economic advancement being the only direction toward progress.

To me, the most puzzling scene in this chapter was when the supervisor overlooked the narrator’s spiteful tampering of paint. While there are many ways to interpret this passage, what I found most unclear is whether Kimbro actually missed the detail or if he detected it but chose to ignore it. The narrator can tell that the paint still contains traces of black by its grey tint, but Kimbro remarks that “that’s the way it oughta be.” When the narrator asks him if he knows what components are actually in the graduate, Kimbro becomes defensive: “His eyes snapped. ‘You damn right I know,’ he said. ‘You just do what you’re told!’” He is obviously aware of the crucial role of black varnish in the paint formula but also in denial that the paint is not purely white. Similarly many Caucasian Americans turned a blind eye to black society, self-assured that their labor and mere existences were only blemishes on society that played no role in white brilliance or prestige. Kimbro needs to believe that the government issued paint is purely white, just as Americans needed to believe that its infrastructure is purely white. (Alternatively, you could interpret this passage as a metaphor to the narrator’s grandfather’s gradual adaptation to the “lion’s mouth”. Like the carefully mixed grey paint, he becomes so well assimilated into this image that his notions are either nonexistent or too subtle for anyone to notice a difference.)