The Bluest Eye Controversy

Throughout Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye, she captures, with vivid insight, the plight of a young African American girl and what she would be subjected to in a media contrived society that places its ideal of beauty on the e quintessential blue-eyed, blonde woman. The idea of what is beautiful has been stereotyped in the mass media since the beginning and creates a mental and emotional damage to self and soul. This oppression to the soul creates a socio-economic displacement causing a cycle of dysfunction and abuses. Morrison takes us through the agonizing story of just such a young girl, Pecola Breedlove, and her aching desire to have what is considered beautiful - blue eyes. Racial stereotypes of beauty contrived and nourished by

81% of Black adults reported that they have experienced at least one incident of day-to-day discrimination. And Adolescence is a stage in which to examine the impact of racial discrimination on the psychological part of African Americans (Racial Identity Matters). Which can cause a person to be scared expectably if someone has already confined in themselves of their race. "My siblings had already instilled the notion of black pride in me. I would have preferred that Mommy were black. Now, as a grown man, I feel privileged to have come from two worlds" (McBride 103). It was easier to accept the black

Author, Dr. Beverly Tatum a clinical psychologist whose main study of interest is Black children’s racial identity development wrote the text Why Are All the Black Kids sitting Together in the Cafeteria? After receiving a letter from a school principal in New Jersey applauding her on her reason of why, in racially mixed schools all over the country, Black kids were still sitting together in school cafeterias. In the text Tatum shares her thoughts about the development of racial identity faced by the African American population and how it is interrelated to racism at the turn of the twentieth century while highlighting the Black-White relation in childhood and adolescence age group. The book entails controversy in that, Dr. Tatum understanding of racism is centered heavily on race. Tatum’s explanation of racism suggest that Blacks cannot be racist based on the fact their racial bigotry do not stand or rest on a structure of advantage.

Throughout all of history there has been an ideal beauty that most have tried to obtain. But what if that beauty was impossible to grasp because something was holding one back. There was nothing one could do to be ‘beautiful’. Growing up and being convinced that one was ugly, useless, and dirty. For Pecola Breedlove, this state of longing was reality. Blue eyes, blonde hair, and pale white skin was the definition of beauty. Pecola was a black girl with the dream to be beautiful. Toni Morrison takes the reader into the life of a young girl through Morrison’s exceptional novel, The Bluest Eye. The novel displays the battles that Pecola struggles with each and every day. Morrison takes the reader through the themes of whiteness and beauty,

The psychological work of both Clarks is focused in the area of racial identity among black youth (Gibbons & Van Nort, 2009, p. 29). They sought to provide evidence of the detrimental effects of a society where social norms are biased toward white culture. Though the Clarks are most widely recognized for their

“The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, is a story about the life of a young black girl, Pecola Breedlove, who is growing up during post World War I. She prays for the bluest eyes, which will “make her beautiful” and in turn make her accepted by her family and peers. The major issue in the book, the idea of ugliness, was the belief that “blackness” was not valuable or beautiful. This view, handed down to them at birth, was a cultural hindrance to the black race.

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.

Bernstein and Morrison expertly shed light on the way children visually consume the culture around them. Consequently, when innocence is attributed to whiteness it dangerously allows for perceptions constructed by society to dictate one’s worth.

We decided to reconduct the test by using a black doll and a white doll to see which doll a group of black kids preferred. The sample consisted of 5 black Passaic County preschool students. Following consent from the schoolteacher and their parents, the member of my group then interviewed the children. The participants were interviewed in a classroom within their preschool. The testing took approximately 10 minutes and consisted of (1) disclosed preferences and (2) children’s self-identification. In general we replicated the same questions asked by Dr. Clark in his 1940 experiment. During the interview the children were shown two different dolls and asked to pick their preferred doll, following multiple questions. Out of 5 black children, 4 children viewed as a white doll to be more preferred. The results were shocking because years after the black is beautiful movement, black children still continue to reject their ethnic

The point of the story is to inform children to keep on stepping even though others will continually put you down and expect the worst from you. This study relates to what we know about the development of African American identity in children as a result of Drs. Mamie and Kenneth Clark’s doll studies (1939) used as critical testimony in Brown vs. Topeka, Board of Education in 1954. Many studies and theories have followed, including, Drs. Parham, Cross, and Tatum. All of these studies addressed racial identity development in their respective research. Racial identity development is a concept referred to as, “the process of defining for oneself the personal significance and social meaning of belonging to a particular racial group" (Tatum, 1997, p. 16). In addition, Cross' Nigrescence framework (Cross, 1971; Cross, Parham, & Helms, 1991), proves to be particularly useful and significantly relevant to the information presented in this article. The Nigrescence model provides a five stage progression of Black American racial identity formation. The fourth and fifth stages of the Nigrescence model are both Internalization stages and foster healing and positive racial identity. The process in stages four and five allow African Americans to become “anchored in a positive sense of racial identity and to perceive and transcend race proactively.” Ultimately, reaching one of these two stages can lead to the first step in the healing process, and the elimination of the transferring of cultural trauma through the folklore of African American tradition and

Curiosity was inevitable for the boy, however, and led him into what William E. Cross’s Nigresence Model declared was the immersion stage of racial identity for a black person. In this stage, African Americans basically submerge

The novel The Bluest Eye written by Toni Morrison is subjected on a young girl, Pecola Breedlove and her experiences growing up in a poor black family. The life depicted is one of poverty, ridicule, and dissatisfaction of self. Pecola feels ugly because of her social status as a poor young black girl and longs to have blue eyes, the pinnacle of beauty and worth. Throughout the book, Morrison touches on controversial subjects, such as the depicting of Pecola's father raping her, Mrs. Breedlove's sexual feelings toward her husband, and Pecola's menstruation. The book's content is controversial on many levels and it has bred conflict among its readers.

Through the research of scholarly articles and publications, it has been found that the intersection of the racial and ethnic identity of an individual both shapes and affects their personal growth and development in childhood and adolescence (Rivas-Drake, et al.). According to French, et al., this has been a more recent conversation with racial preference being researched in the 1940’s and 1950’s using dolls, and research involving the ethnic identity of children, under the age of 10, beginning only in the early 1990’s (2). Furthermore, earlier data involved mostly African American adolescents and focused on their negative experiences and internalization of racism rather than positive

In exploring the problem of identity in Black literature we find no simple or definite explanation. Nevertheless, it is generally accepted that it is rooted in the reality of the discriminatory social system in America with its historic origins in the institution of slavery. One can discern that this slavery system imposes a double burden on the Negro through severe social and economic inequalities and through the heavy psychological consequences suffered by the Negro who is forced to play an inferior role, 1 the latter relates to the low self-estimate, feeling of helplessness and basic identity conflict. Thus, in some form or the other, every Negro American is confronted with the

On the one hand, if an individual, and by extent, its community is influenced by these discourses, the community will loose its identity, its self-acceptance and, as a consequence, it will hate itself for not having the characteristics that the discourses defend. However, on the other hand, if an individual, and by extent, its community, is able to overtake those discourses, its identity will not be modified by those discourses, and therefore, the individual as the community will love, accept and acknowledge their true self. With this novel, Morrison tries to make aware the reader that stereotypes and racial discourses do not give space for multiplicity nor ethnicity; and as they are social constructions, they can be deconstructed. To sum up, the novel is an example of the African American community’s quest to fully overthrow the oppressive discourses that do not allow the acknowledgment and realization of their