A review about Racial discrimination in The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Abstract

Morrison describes the bluest eye as a "narrative of female violation shown from the vantage point of the victims or could-be victims...the girls themselves" (Afterward). Young black girls represent the helpless and weak in the book, but they also serve as a lens through which to examine issues of power, internalised racism, and reparations. What happens if people who were formerly outside the normative formation become the norm? Instead of dwelling on Pecola's internalised self-loathing, I decided to highlight the ways in which her physique, her desire for blue eyes, and her need for community all function as tools for redress and resistance. Drinking milk, buying sweets with Mary Jane on it, and using a Shirley Temple cup become means for a black female kid to express not just her identification as a black girl, but also her knowledge of her place as a black girl in a white society. To her, blue eyes are a panacea for the systemic abuses — including poverty, domestic violence, and starvation — that she endures. These types of reparation might help her make sense of her experience of racism, ease the suffering caused by the severe violence she witnesses, and inspire her to construct a new politics.