Consequences Of Racism In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

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Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye challenges the ubiquitous societal concepts of race, notions fashioned through the viewpoint of whites, by seizing these white concepts and placing them into a context devoid of white intellectual influence, a space in which the only residue of the white gaze is found in black internalized racism. Morrison’s unique narrative dealing with black characters relayed through “language embedded in black culture” forces readers to truly investigate the consequences of racism by tearing away from a superficial discussion embedded in a white lens and throwing readers into a visceral black experience of racism (Morrison xii). Morrison requires the reader to interact with the story, to reassemble the storyline by delving …show more content…

Morrison shapes an impressionable, young, passive character in Pecola in order to emphasize the part that family and parents play in one’s internalization of racism. Pecola is not surrounded by a supportive and loving family; rather Pecola’s father and mother, both individually and jointly as parental figures, create a toxic environment. Pauline, Pecola’s mother, was not able to teach her daughter self-love or provide her any happiness, but rather she instilled in Pecola a “fear of growing up, fear of other people, fear of life” (Morrison 128). As much as this mother/daughter reltaitonship was lacking, Cholly scarred Pecola much deeper, he failed in his position as a father even before he brutally raped Pecola, literally tearing away her innocence (161-163). Neither Pauline nor Cholly provided Pecola a good parental figure, with safe familial relationships that would protect her from internalizing racism; instead they implanted in their daughter this negative view of self, a festering view that tore away Pecola’s innocence at an early age. As parents, they raised Pecola in a manner that taught her to view herself through the eyes of the white world and thereby perpetuate the issue of internalized

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