KEEP AMERICA PURE WITH
LIBERTY PAINTS
Chapter 10 begins with the narrator’s new job at Liberty Paints, a paint factory specializing in a characteristic white paint. Color serves as a thinly-veiled criticism of the white dominance defining the United States at the time.
Purity is a recurring theme in Invisible Man. By reading this slogan, we are pushed to ask what this purity means. To “keep” America pure implies that America is struggling to remain that way, and by choosing Liberty Paints, an all-white paint vendor, the slogan makes a white America synonymous with the purity that is trying to be kept. There are few other inferences that can be made through the slogan that aren’t blatantly racist. The slogan is comical, suggesting that white supremacists are free to engage in such signaling because blacks and other minorities are either too clueless to notice, or powerless to object.
Nonetheless, the narrator becomes intimately involved with the production of the white paint that symbolizes the discrimination and oppression of his own race. This lends itself to Ellison’s own Marxist ideology; his own labor is ultimately meaningless as long as he uses his earnings to live in a hostile society that he actively works to prop up. One of the office boys remarks that the government is one of the factory’s largest buyers. “We’re one of the biggest outfits in the business,” he says. “Make a lot of paint for the government.” The constant need for white paint implies a constant need for the government to reaffirm its whiteness. The nature of good paint is to cover and conceal what lies underneath. Kimbro praises the end result of one of the narrator’s batches as a paint “that’ll cover just about anything!” (156) A pure-white colored paint can only appear the same for so long – periodic reapplication is necessary to hide the color underneath. Similarly, the government must have a lot to cover up, all the while maintaining an outward appearance of being pure as well as white if they are such a frequent buyer.
However, a crucial ingredient of the paint’s trademark pure-white color itself consists of “glistening black drops” (154). On the ironic contrast in color, the narrator is told: “Never mind how it looks. That’s my worry. You just do what you’re told and don’t try to think about it” (155). This implies a fundamental insecurity in the purity of “Optic White” (simply saying the color is superficially white to the eye) paint and in the self-sufficiency of white supremacy. The black ingredient is essential to the whitening process, and the narrator is told not to think about it. The “purity” is an illusion when the process is exposed.
Most significant in this scene is when the theme of invisibility resurfaces:
“I looked at the painted slab. It appeared the same: a gray tinge glowed through the whiteness, and Kimbro had failed to detect it. I stared for about a minute, wondering if I were seeing things, inspected another and another. All were the same, a brilliant white diffused with gray” (158).
Once again, only the narrator seems to see what is invisible to Kimbro: a tinge of imperfection. The narrator spitefully undermines the illusion of white purity by shirking instructions, but Kimbro can only see whiteness where the narrator sees the flaws.
Great analysis of this scene, which we also covered rather extensively in class. I like, in particular, how you note the protagonist’s subversion of whiteness when Kimbro comes for inspection. As with so many of Ellison’s more elaborate conceits, this one gains complexity when we consider the second black liquid this serves an opposite purpose, but which is indistinguishable to the author. And then the way this complex metaphor takes on a new resonance with the chapter’s exploration of Brockaway’s underground labors.