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Ralph Ellison Jim Crow Analysis

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The United States of America is the land of the free and home of the Brave. The question asked by many is: it truly the land of the free? Throughout our country's history there lies a deep seated issue of racism spanning back to before the american revolutionary period. Slavery spanned all the way until 1865 when it was abolished via the 13th Amendment in our constitution. This terminated the legality of slavery at the public level, however you cannot simply change people's views on something by amending a document. There still remained a heavily segregated world; with things like the Jim Crows laws enacted in the 1880s shortly after the abolition of slavery. All the while people are being viewed through the narrow lense of racism. Ralph Ellison’s …show more content…

The M.O. of this factory “KEEP AMERICA PURE WITH LIBERTY PAINTS.”(196) which when analyzed deeper the true meaning comes to center stage. Ellison uses this motto of the factory to specifically address the common beliefs of the time period. The Liberty Paints factory serves as a metaphor for racial inequality in America at the time. The factory’s slogans emphasize concepts of white supremacy and this, so called concept of purity. In addition, usage of the word liberty in the name of the company provides a sense of irony. Liberty is one of the founding principles of this country, yet thousands of people specifically African Americans were discriminated against harshly and frankly not even seen as people. African Americans were seen as a group which played a minimal role in society and lacked any real purpose. Ellison contradicts this idea through the image of the optic white paint and the paint factory to exhibit the significance blacks play in society even with highly abundant racial blindness. The majority if not all of the workers in the Liberty Paint Factory are black, however the color they specialize in paint described as“so white you can paint a chunka coal and you’d have to crack it open with a sledgehammer to prove it wasn’t white clear through.” (217). This image of the paint drives home the theme of racial …show more content…

This pressing issue encompasses the whole of our world and resonates deeply within the hearts and minds of people all throughout the american society. Ellison utilizes visual images such as the sambo bank or the Liberty Paint Factory to illustrate the deep issues of racial blindness and discrimination within the United States. Each image holds far deeper implications than simply the literal, these images when analyzed helps the readers to come to a deeper understanding with how people in the story were viewed and help to provide perspective for the challenges the narrator faced. As well as helping readers to come to the realization of how narrow people's perspective on race really was, but also provide people with a deeper understanding of the horrible impact of discrimination in the

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