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Essay on Media Perpetuating Racism in Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye"
In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison's emphasis is on racism. Specifically, she investigates the effects of the beauty standards of the dominant culture on the self-image of the African female adolescent. The role of class, the primary form of exploitation experienced by African people that will become the focus of later works, is only relevant insofar as it exacerbates that self-image. Of the three main characters—all African female adolescents—it is Pecola Breedlove who is the primary focus. It is she who is most affected by the dominant culture's beauty standards because it is she who is the poorest and, consequently, the most vulnerable. Thus, even with this early work, Morrison is conscious of the role economics plays in the African's having a wholesome self-image. For it is the Breed loves' fight for survival that weakens the family structure and makes the family members more vulnerable to the propaganda of the dominant culture. Still, it is clear that in The Bluest Eye Morrison regards racism as the African's primary obstacle. Describing the Breed loves, she writes: “Although their poverty was traditional and stultifying, it was not unique. But their ugliness was unique.” (Toni Morrison, 1970, 24).
This comment demonstrates that in the late 1960s, when this novel was written, Morrison's level of consciousness about the primary cause of the nature of the African's oppression in the United States as well as in the rest of the world was considerably weak, for she not only subordinates the role of economics to racism, but also neglects to show a causal relationship between them, that an exploitative economic system gives rise to racist ideology.
The thesis of the novel is that racism devastates the self-image of the African female in general and the African female child in particular. Toni Morrison's emphasis is on the society, not the family unit......
