Optic White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness
1994; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 24; Issue: 2/3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/465165
ISSN1080-6539
Autores Tópico(s)Australian History and Society
ResumoYou know the best sellingpaint got, the one that made this here business? he asked as helped him fill a vat with a smelly substance. No, don't. white, Optic White. Why white rather than the others? 'Cause started stressing it from the first. We make the best white paint in the world, don't give a damn what nobody says. 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! ... Well, you might not believe it, but helped the Old Man make up that slogan. 'If It's Optic White, It's the Right White,' he quoted with upraised finger, like a preacher quoting holy writ. I got me a three-hundred-dollar bonus for helping to think that up. 'IfIt's Optic White, It's the Right White,' repeated and suddenly had to repress a laugh as a childhood jingle rang through my mind: If you're white, you're right,' said. [Ellison 190] Two media reports occurring within about a week of each other caught my attention as one seemed to comment on the other: one, a Time magazine cover story documenting with a certain unease what it called Browning of America; and the other, a National Public Radio news broadcast in which George Bush, a man whose family includes Mexican-American grandchildren, reassured Soviet leader Gorbachev that the US and the USSR share common interests because we are thus officially marginalizing the growing number of Americans whose heritage is other than European, as well as significant numbers of increasingly militant non-European Soviets. Bush's rhetoric is an apt demonstration of a floating signifier used in an attempt to heal a history of political antagonism through a not-quite-subliminal appeal to racial bonding. That the international appeal to a common racial heritage ignores racial diversity within political borders of the respective nations is not surprising, given the traditional orientation of the US in identifying itself as a white nation allied with other white nations in controlling and policing the globe, as minority populations are routinely controlled and policed within national borders. The President's insistence that Americans are Europeans, together with the report on America's browning, suggests to me an interesting connection with the genre of passing literature of which Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson is perhaps the most cynical example. While Bush's statement comments on the contemporary political function of racial identity on a global scale, Twain's problematic and frustrating novel, with all of its shortcomings, is a stinging indictment of a legal tradition that glorifies the freedom of the individual while founding and supporting a race-class-gender system that inexorably
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