Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture

Optic Black:Naturalizing the Refusal to Fit

W. T. LHAMON, JR. Optic Black Naturalizing the Refusal to Fit While he’s working at the Liberty Paint Company, Ralph Ellison’s naive youth in Invisible Man must learn the secret of whitewash. Because ten drops of black dope go into every tin of “Optic White . . . the Right White,” the black foreman in charge of this mix proudly tells the youth, “we the machine inside the machine.”1 He knows blackness mixes ineradicably in the purported whitenings of of‹cial life, and Ellison’s point, put simply in another register, is that blackness is the stealth ingredient in America’s bourgeois public sphere. I will argue here that both Ellison’s now widely known secret and its metacommentary are also true inversely. An optic blackness, to which whites have contributed all along, has grown up to prove the right white wrong. My account cues on Ellisonian phrases that Harryette Mullen reads to good effect in her important article “Optic White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness.”2 But my claims neither argue with her position nor follow in its path, for what I have to say on these issues runs awry from Mullen’s emphases on racial passing and the marginalization of blacks by the creation of an optic white ideology. Optic blackness certainly is about performing a blackness, but it is not about passing. On the contrary, it always features its mixing of modes. It is about compounding af‹nities, not seamless cover. Nor do I think optic blackness marginalizes blacks or whites. Instead, it struggles to lever into view a particular blackness that disaffected peoples of every ethnicity in the United States evoke to signal their dissatis‹ed relation to American and Atlantic history. Optic blackness is a contrapuntal cultural style that opposes whiteness, is available to participants who include, but certainly are not limited to, blacks, and embodies a persistent countermemory of historical opposition.3 Optic 111 blackness was the earliest style of the ‹rst transnational popular culture that grew up around the blackface ‹gure of Jim Crow.4 Because its countermemory and gestural repertoire continually evolve, ever drawing, since its constellation in the 1830s, on its past, optic blackness is now transtemporal —that is, it keeps a running tab on its past that is legible in its successive signs.5 Because optic black continues to attract downwardly mobile and alienated members of the middle class to its plebeian mode, it remains and sustains an important cross-class formation. As surely as tiny measured amounts of black pigment are necessary to show off the “right white,” American and Atlantic cultures have regularly constituted a particular blackness with white infusions. These white traces make the blackness more starkly apparent and perhaps more culturally abrasive to those who disdain, fear, and oppose it. Let me begin unraveling what’s at stake in these inversions with six propositions: 1. Optic blackness is a function of cultural optics that do not render experiential reality for blacks or any ethnic group but give, instead, a convenient, pliable mediation of the real—a ‹ction that seems suf‹ciently real for cultural symbolism. 2. Thus optic black is less about “race” than about the positional binary of its own pretense and momentum. 3. Optic blackness persists across historical epochs, artistic periods, and political ideologies. 4. Optic blackness is not contained in any form, genre, or medium, be it high or low; it weaves through them all. 5. The contending forces of optic black and optic white center their dispute in American culture and defend their dominion everywhere Atlantic slavery was. 6. Optic black reconstitutes a “plebeian public sphere,” which Jürgen Habermas notes “was suppressed in the historical process” that formed the bourgeois public sphere and incited historians to focus on its more familiar domain.6 Performers who underwrite these propositions drive the machine inside the machine of American vernacular art. They open spaces in public where an alternative to optic whiteness can do its oppositional work. That work is chie›y the display of a widespread refusal to ‹t. The recurrent usefulness of optic blackness as a plebeian—and I will claim lumpen—alternative sphere is what I am after here, as well as its BLACK CULTURAL TRAFFIC 112 oppositional relation to the optic white public sphere. In optic whiteness, a seamless passing is necessary for survival. The black foreman at the Liberty Paint Company is proud that the paint...