Invisible Man Segregation

829 Words2 Pages

Malcolm X said, “America preaches integration and practices segregation. In the 1930s, the color of your skin ultimately determined your placement in society, yet everyone needed each other in order to prosper. Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison, contains many historical aspects, with the most prominent being the racial differences in 1930s America, which caused segregation and a need for integration. The color of an individual’s skin and their experiences set people apart and prevented them from being seen as equals, which ultimately led to people masking their true identity in order to be accepted.
Race is a common theme in Invisible Man, as it was in the 1930s. The 1930s “[contained] the paradox of a self-destructive understanding imposed …show more content…

In Invisible Man, everything regarding color was distorted, from people to paint. Nothing was seen for what it truly was. There were things that were being masked by other factors. The most obvious example is when the narrator was at the Liberty Paints factory. He is told that “[their] white is so white you can paint a chunka coal and you’d have to crack it open to prove it wasn’t white clear through” (Ellison 213). Similar to the paint, black people weren’t seen for who they were, but rather for the color of their skin. So, hiding who they were helped them gain some recognition from white people. If they acted like a white man, they weren’t seen as a black man, like Dr. Bledsoe. Dr. Bledsoe gave the illusion that he was of the same status of a white man, which ultimately gained him the “visibility” that a lot of black individuals didn’t …show more content…

When in the paint factory, the narrator is told to put “ten drops of this stuff” (Ellison 195) into each bucket of paint, but the buckets had white paint and the stuff he was supposed to drop into the buckets “was dead black” (Ellison 195). He was told to use no more and no less than ten drops of the black liquid (Ellison 196). Although he had added the black liquid, the paint was “the purest white” (Ellison 197). The paint could not be so white without the black, showing that one was dependent on the other, in order to have a successful outcome. “Black and white Americans have been so long and so intimately a part of one another’s experience that, will it or not, they cannot be understood independently” (Huggins 11), much like the paint, white individuals could not thrive without black people, and vice versa. Without the other, both black and white individuals would not be able to progress in

Open Document