The black fly on the white hair

 When a housefly landed on Vice President Pence's head during his vide-presidential debate with Sen. Kamala Harris last night, and remained there for a little over two whole minutes, I was reminded of Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man, in which the unnamed protagonist gets a job working in a paint factory where his task is to insert one drop of black paint into an otherwise all-white paint mixture. He's told that this makes the white paint whiter. I was skeptical that this symbolism in the novel was anything other than a fantasy in real life until I learned that in the manufacture of paint, a tiny amount of black is indeed injected into the white. And so the same symbolism was injected into the debate last night. A further irony was also evident. While the black fly made itself at home atop Pence's close-cropped white hair, Pence was denying that systemic racism existed in US society in general and police departments in particular. Evidently he did not even notice the black fly that was perched atop his white head.