Racism in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye Essay

At a time when blue-eyed, pale skin Shirley Temple is idolized by white and black alike,

Toni Morrison, the author of The Bluest Eye, centers her novel around two things: beauty and wealth in their relation to race and a brutal rape of a young girl by her father. Morrison explores and exposes these themes in relation to the underlying factors of black society: racism and sexism. Every character has a problem to deal with and it involves racism and/or sexism. Whether the characters are the victim or the aggressor, they can do nothing about their problem or condition, especially when concerning gender and race. Morrison's characters are clearly at the mercy of preconceived notions maintained by society. Because of these preconceived notions, the racism found in The Bluest Eye is not whites against blacks. Morrison writes about

The desire to feel beautiful has never been more in demand, yet so impossible to achieve. In the book “The Bluest Eye”, the author, Toni Morrison, tells the story of two black families that live during the mid-1900’s. Even though slavery is a thing of the past, discrimination and racism are still a big issue at this time. Through the whole book, characters struggle to feel beautiful and battle the curse of being ugly because of their skin color. Throughout the book Pecola feels ugly and does not like who she is because of her back skin. She believes the only thing that can ever make her beautiful is if she got blue eyes. Frieda, Pecola, Claudia, and other black characters have been taught that the key to being beautiful is by having white skin. So by being black, this makes them automatically ugly. In the final chapter of the book, the need to feel beautiful drives Pecola so crazy that she imagines that she has blue eyes. She thinks that people don’t want to look at her because they are jealous of her beauty, but the truth is they don’t look at her because she is pregnant. From the time these black girls are little, the belief that beauty comes from the color of their skin has been hammered into their mind. Mrs. Breedlove and Geraldine are also affected by the standards of beauty and the impossible goal to look and be accepted by white people. Throughout “The Bluest Eye” Toni Morrison uses the motif of beauty to portray its negative effect on characters.

The media has become the world’s largest oppression outlet. Whether it be through movies, TV shows, or real-life news, the media has become capable of shifting one’s view on either yourself or other groups of people. Types of oppression that can result from the media include, but are not limited to, internalized oppression and interpersonal oppression. Internalized oppression is when a member of an oppressed group believes and acts out the stereotypes created about their group. Interpersonal oppression, on the other hand, is the belief that one group of people are superior to another group of people. Essentially, the media broadcasts ideas from interpersonal oppression and causes internalized oppression through the

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye explores the impact of home on childhood, the formative years of any human. Throughout the book, she describes the childhoods of both adults, namely Polly Breedlove and Cholly Breedlove, and children, specifically Pecola, Claudia, and “Junior,” and leaves the reader to figure out how their childhoods shaped who they are. In the novel. Morrison argues that the totality of one’s childhood, including one’s home and experiences, is key in forming one’s disposition and character later in life. In doing so, Morrison wants the reader to see that the best defense against a predatory, racist society is the home.

Racism. Protests. Profiling. These three words are common buzzwords that are used in the United States media almost daily. They are used so often, some contend, that it has created a sense of apathy in the American public in regards to solving the age-old problem that has its roots grounded in slavery. Burns states, “[Toni] Morrison contends that the American history of slavery had been consciously “disremembered” so that it is conveniently shrouded by a comfortable state of national amnesia”. Likewise, in her novel the characters Sethe and Paul D in the novel Beloved by Toni Morrison also exist in a state of amnesia—but of their own slavery. In this essay, I will argue that in the novel Beloved, Toni Morrison use characters Sethe and Paul D and their willed forgetfulness of slavery and past actions to reveal the modern reader’s absent-mindedness of slavery and discussions of race.

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison introduces readers to the life of Pecola Breedlove living in Lorain, Ohio during the end of Great Depression. Pecola and her friend, Frieda Macteer, experience early on neglective parents who are overly concerned with pleasing themselves rather than directing attention upon their daughters. This creates a sense of underlying hate and instability within and outside their homes. Looking for love and attention, Pecola turns to superficial things such as dolls. Pecola wants to feel beautiful in a world where a blue-eyed, pale skin Shirley Temple doll is idolized by all colors alike. Her goal in life is to attain white beauty, a standard of her culture she believes she does not have. The effects of colorism and racism tear the African-American culture apart in this novel because they try so hard to fit into the graces of white society. The characters in The Bluest Eye hate their skin color so much that that are forced to feel shame for their own culture. The desires to be beautiful create a sense of self-loathing and self-hate within most, if not all, of the characters, which pass from generation to generation producing an on-going cycle of negativity.

The plight of the weak against the powerful is one of the oldest and compelling stories that can be told, and it has always been the story of race in the United States. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is a candid look into the lives of African Americans in the early 1940’s, focusing on the drama surrounding the coming of age of young girls. The debilitating effects of racism, sexism, and classism on children and adults of different social statuses are explored through the stories of a number of families. By illustrating a society in which each class elevates itself by oppressing those below them, Morrison demonstrates how the cyclical nature of oppression can cripple a community and family for generations.

The notion of black masculinity has historically been associated with violence. Yet, in ‘The Bluest Eye’ Morrison interrogates the underlying reasons for this connection through providing a back story to black masculine violence. Morrison is concerned in her novel with reflecting the experiences of African Americans in 1940s Ohio. The reality of life for black Americans in 1940s Ohio was that they had to contend with the ordeal of life under both de jure and de facto segregation. In Ohio it was commonplace for businesses to have ‘separate areas for whites and African

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison narrates the lives of two families, the MacTeer family and the Breedlove family. The novel digs into the themes of love, envy, and weakness, while maintaining a thick and interesting plotline. These themes are conveyed thoroughly through Morrison’s literary style. Toni Morrison’s powerful writing and structural techniques add depth to the novel, enhancing certain emotions while developing a riveting plot.

The Bluest Eye concentrates on the key contemporary American issues: racial and sexual politics. More distinctly, the novel centres on the impact that socially constructed views of race have on gender relations within the black community. As Butler-Evans highlights, “race rather than gender had become the overriding sign for the oppression of black people” and Morrison’s novel responds to this political issue by focusing on this in correlation with the Eurocentric society setting of the novel. The racial oppression suffered by the black community shape ideas of black masculinity based on male feelings of inferiority and consequent sexual oppression of black females. Morrison systematically explores the relationship between the racial oppression of black males and sexual oppression of black females. The main focus of this essay will be an exploration of how racial oppression experienced by black males, specifically Cholly and Junior, relate to the sexual oppression they enforce on black females.

Racism in The Bluest Eye "There is really nothing more to say--except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how." When bad things happen to us, the first thing we ask ourselves is "why"? Most of the time however, the answer to "why" is not readily available to us, and sometimes there is not an answer at all.

In the novel, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison readers are taken throughout the daily lives of African Americans who are faced with numerous trial & tribulations. Already facing the harsh reality that they were inferior to the white race. There were many families throughout this story that was faced with this stigma, however it seemed that the Breedloves had it just twice as hard. A series of social problems of which African Americans were victims to during the 1940s-1060s such as Rape, interracial prejudice, and mental illness.

Morrison's concerns for the Black society and the perseverance of its unique culture can be seen throughout her literary work. She always returns to the themes of marginalization and alienation of blacks in white society. The Bluest Eye discuss the experience of the oppressed Black minorities in White society, the majority of Morrison's characters are Black who suffer from racism, poverty and oppression.

Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye is a harsh look on past and present aspects of racism in a time that many people now do not recall. It touches on subjects such as the public humiliation that being black seemingly deserved, not only from children, but the ridicule and judgement that black people faced from adults who should have known better. Comparatively, The Bluest Eye also emphasizes the mindset that the lighter someone’s skin is, the more beautiful they are, which is shown though the way mixed people in the novel are more accepted and loved by others, simply for their lighter skin, even by the narrators. Because of this harsh discrimination and the European beauty standards that are still in place today, Pecola’s fate was destined from the beginning. Pecola Breedlove is simply a little girl who wants to be beautiful in a world that refuses to see her as such and treats her with the utmost disrespect, the physical and mental abuse driving her to the point of insanity. Through the various technical facets of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Morrison attempts to not only humanize her characters in the eyes of her readers through the use of switching perspective, but to allow her audience to truly empathize with them by shifting the narration from third to first person, and putting a twist on the literary symbolism that seasons have been used for in past works.