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15 Optic White Blackness and the production of Whiteness “you know the best selling paint we got, the one that made this here business?” he asked as i helped him fill a vat with a smelly substance. “n o, i don’t.” “o ur white, o ptic White.” “Why white rather than the others?” “’Cause we started stressing it from the first. We make the best white paint in the world, i don’t give a damn what nobody says. o ur 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 i helped the o ld Man make up that slogan. ‘if it’s o ptic White, it’s the r ight 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.” “‘if it’s o ptic White, it’s the r ight White,’” i repeated and suddenly had to repress a laugh as a childhood jingle rang through my mind: “if you’re white, you’re right,’” i said. e llison 190 t wo 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 “The Browning of a merica”; and the other, a n ational public r adio news broadcast in which George Bush, a man whose family includes Mexican-a merican grandchildren , reassured soviet leader Gorbachev that the United states and soviet Union share common interests because “we are europeans,” thus officially marginalizing the growing number of a mericans 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 the political borders of the respective nations is not surprising, given the traditional orientation of the United states in identifying itself as a white nation allied Blackness and the production of Whiteness 131 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 a mericans are europeans, together with the report on a merica’s “browning,” suggests to me an interesting connection with the genre of passing literature of which t wain’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, t wain’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 reduces individuals to their functions within an economic mode of production . in both cases considerable cultural and political weight is given to the possession of white credentials as a prerequisite for a controlling interest in political and economic transactions. in a nation that has always been at least triracial and that, as Time so ruefully reports, is now dazzlingly multicultural and getting browner all the time, Bush presents a vision of a multicolored nation passing as a politically white superpower as it is threatened with diminished influence in a time of global power shifts. The usual mechanism of passing, which i take as a model for the cultural production of whiteness, requires an active denial of black identity only by the individual who passes from black to white, while the chosen white identity is strengthened in each successive generation by the presumption that white identities are racially pure. passing on an individual level models the cultural production of whiteness as a means of nation building and as a key to national identity. Just as the white-skinned a frican a merican becomes white through a process of silencing and suppression, by denying, “forgetting ,” ignoring, or erasing evidence of a frican ancestry, so does the “pure white” family constitute itself by denying kinship with its nonwhite members , as the racially diverse nation claims a white european identity by marginalizing its non-european heritages. While some a mericans...

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