A review about Racial discrimination in The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
Keywords:
The Bluest Eye, internalized racism, cultural idealsAbstract
In Morrison’s words, the bluest eye is a “story of female violation revealed from the vantage of the victims or could-be victims...the girls themselves” (Afterward). The young black girls in the novel constitute the powerless and the most vulnerable, but they also pose as a site to understand power, internalized racism and redress. What happens if you center those who have been ex-ec-centric to the normative formation? I chose to focus on the way that Pecola’s body, her yearn for blue eyes, and her longing for community, constitutes means for redress and resistance, rather than internalization of self-hatred. In the position of a black child, drinking milk, purchasing candy with Mary Jane on it, and sipping out of a Shirley Temple mug become ways to articulate not only her identity as a black girl, but an understanding of her position of a black girl in a white society. Blue eyes represent a remedy for the structural violence that she experiences – poverty, domestic violence, and hunger. These different forms of redress may be ways to articulate her blackness in relation to whiteness, a form of temporary relief from the pain of the extreme violence that she endures, and a means to forge a new politics.
References
Ferguson, Roderick A. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Minneapolis (Minn.): University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Mask. New York: Grove Press, 1967.
Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Mitchell, Michele. Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Vintage Books, 2016.
