The narrator is expelled from college by Dr. Bledsoe, whose name, which sounds like "bled so," suggests that he has been bled of his integrity by a racist culture. Bledsoe explains that he has intuited that Mr. Norton, whether he knows it or not, wants the narrator "disciplined" for taking him to the home of the incestuous Jim Trueblood. Bledsoe states that in bringing Norton together with Trueblood, the narrator threatened the very foundations of the school, saying that the narrator could have undone in half an hour what the school has spent years building.

When the narrator protests that Bledsoe promised Norton nothing would happen to him, and that he will go to Norton and tell him that Bledsoe lied, Bledsoe just laughs and says:

You're nobody, son. You don't exist—can't you see that?

Bledsoe insists that he has the power to pull all the strings at the school, and that he has this power because he knows how to pretend to cater to the white men who support the school. He tells the narrator he is a fool for forgetting that Black survival is based on lying to white people. He informs the narrator that he is too much of a danger to the school to be allowed to stay, and also informs him that he, Bledsoe, would throw any Black person under the bus—or into the hands of a lynch mob—to keep his own power intact.

All of this is confirmation of the narrator's sense of invisibility and of his early sense that rather than tearing down the veil between white and Black people, the college really exists to keep it in place.