The study of racism in literature

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye stands among the most searching examinations of internalised racism in American fiction, tracing the psychic damage wrought upon a young Black girl by a society that measures beauty and worth against a white standard she can never meet. In the tragic novel, Pecola Breedlove, an eleven-year-old Black girl, is a victim of racial hatred, self-loathing, and rape by her father which results in pregnancy. Pecola grows up in an abusive and unloving family. She longs to disappear from the face of the Earth to rid herself of her problems. Writers often highlight the values of a culture or a society by using characters who are alienated from that culture. In the tragic story, The Bluest Eye, the writer shows existing social problems throughout the story. Through the life of Pecola Breedlove, the protagonist, the writer provides a clear example of how widespread racism, sexism, and social class had affected the 1940s.

Racism was dominant in a large part of the book The Bluest Eye. A cute young girl should have a wonderful happy early childhood; however, since she is Black, others make fun of her and look down on her, making her childhood deeply unhappy. Pecola Breedlove, a young girl who believes that she is unattractive and that having blue eyes would make her beautiful, has experienced unnecessary pain from racism. At one point, Pecola is noted to be talking with the white retailer who has little affection for Pecola. Eye imagery pervades the scene, as the retailer cannot actually “see” Pecola (Morrison, 151), meaning that in social terms she is rendered invisible. In the nineteenth century, racism was in full effect in large areas of America. In these areas, white people treated Black people as if they were “nothing.” People even established an anti-Black law, the Jim Crow law, to restrict Black people and treat them unequally. Some of the conditions imposed on them under Jim Crow were that Black people were not supposed to shake hands with whites because they were not considered socially equal; every time they were caught shaking a white woman’s hand, they were also accused of committing crimes such as rape. The Jim Crow law made it legal to segregate the races in public facilities. Even a young boy in the society was taught to be racist, as seen when a boy bullies Pecola for being Black in public places such as the playground.

It was their contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult its teeth. They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds — cooled — and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path (Morrison, 101).

During the nineteenth century, people in America generally held a distorted standard for beauty, as they thought that only people with white skin are beautiful — a belief that racism perpetuated and codified. This racial stereotype can be seen through Pecola because she does not find herself beautiful, having been taught to believe that only white is pretty. Pecola cannot learn to notice her own beauty, because no one around her will support her into believing it. At one point, Pecola passes a bit of dandelions when she walks into Mr. Yacobowski’s shop (47). She got confused when she remembered that people say “Why, she wonders, do people call them weeds? She thought they were pretty” (Morrison, 47). The sliver of happiness that Pecola saw in the dandelion seems to be erased after Mr. Yacobowski’s disapproving stare. When she passes the dandelion again she says, “They are ugly. They are weeds” (Morrison, 50). She seems to transfer the society’s rejection of her onto the dandelions. Beauty is a very important thing to everyone, although, as Morrison writes, “It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights — if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different” (Morrison, 46). The narrator states that if what Pecola believed changed, her life would be totally different. Her desire for blue eyes represents not vanity but a desperate wish to be seen as human and worth something.

Social classes are seen in Pecola’s life as well. During this time, African Americans were considered a lower social caste. Since there were so many economic barriers for African Americans during the nineteenth century, the African American citizens that the reader encounters are mostly working-class folks who work as servants for white families. Pecola is an example of this: her mother is the one who works as a maid for a rich, white family to earn money. The structural dimensions of this inequality have their origins in the history of the slave trade. “Africans cooperated with Europeans in the slave trade, and some slaves transported to America were already of the slave class” (Becker). The control centre of the African slave trade was located in Tropical America, and thirty-six of the forty-two slave ports were placed in the region of Ghana. Aside from Ghana, slaves were sent from multiple regions across Africa, including Senegambia, the Bight of Biafra, the Gold Coast, the Ivory Coast, and Central Africa. Over half of the enslaved people from these groups were sent to South America, 42% to the Caribbean Islands, 7% to British North America, and the remainder to Central America (Becker). The legacy of this history shaped the economic and social position of Black communities in America well into the twentieth century, making Pecola’s vulnerability far from accidental.

The birdlike gestures are worn away to a mere picking and plucking her way between the tire rims and the sunflowers, between Coke bottles and milkweed, among all the waste and beauty of the world — which is what she herself was. All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us (Morrison, 53).

Morrison has highlighted the values of a society by illustrating the existing social problems such as racism, sexism, and social class. Through the tragedy of Pecola Breedlove, Morrison has shown how society can affect people’s attitudes towards others and themselves. The Bluest Eye brings attention to the problems in history and critiques them with precision. The tragedy of Pecola Breedlove reveals the harshness of the views dominant in 1940, harshness that should never be repeated again.

As Gillman (2021) argues, Morrison’s fiction consistently forces readers to confront the way racial hierarchy infiltrates not only social structures but the most intimate dimensions of self-perception. The lasting power of The Bluest Eye for students of American literature and critical race studies lies in its demonstration that racism is most destructive when it is internalised, when its victims come to judge themselves by the oppressor’s standards. For contemporary scholars examining intersectionality, Pecola’s experience at the junction of race, gender, and class remains a canonical example of how multiple systems of oppression compound individual suffering.

Work Cited

Morrison, T. (1970). The Bluest Eye. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Becker, E. (1999). Chronology on the History of Slavery. Retrieved from http://innercity.org/holt/slavechron.html

Gillman, L. (2021). The Bluest Eye: Race, Class and the Politics of Desire. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195380941.001.0001

Kuenz, J. (2019). The bluest eye and internalized racism in Morrison’s fiction. African American Review, 53(2), 89–104. https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2019.0012

Norton, M. B., et al. (2001). A People and a Nation: A History of the United States (6th ed.). Houghton Mifflin.