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| Shirley Temple--blond ringlets, blue eyes, white skin and all. OH, and a fur coat. Race/racism meet animal slaughter--in one photo. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/ShirleyTempleMackenzieKing2b.jpg |
After the Great Depression, this is what the reality for many black families looked like: “Being a minority in both caste and class, we moved about anyway on the hem of life, struggling to consolidate our weaknesses and hang on, or to creep singly up into the major folds of the garment. Our peripheral existence, however, was something we had learned to deal with—probably because it was abstract” (11). Institutionalized racism to some may seem abstract. But the manifestation of racism in the lives of the oppressed is not so abstract, as Claudia’s observations and Pecola’s life confirm.
Cholly Breedlove exemplifies par excellence what an act of racism can do to someone—as an abstraction and a concrete trauma. What is can cause and how long the trauma lingers. In this particular example, when he is caught having sex with a woman outside by two white men, he was “humiliat[ed], defeat[ed], and emasculat[ed]” (32). Racism in a few words: “The master said, ‘You are ugly people.’” (32) Imagine the idea of feeling ugly—but only because everybody else, society, media, and magazines tell you constantly. This string of four words is a crime against humanity—and nothing less.
Moreover, this incident reminds me of internalized racism/sexism. Like in Cholly's case, he goes on to despise women (and no doubt the white man) and create a hostile domestic environment for his children, as a result of repeated exposure to the racist rays of U.S. society. Furthermore, when Pecola is harassed by black boys, Claudia speculates on the curious racial slurs that fill the air: “They had extemporized a verse made up of two insults about matters over which the victim had no control; the color of her skin and speculations on the sleeping habits of an adult, wildly fitting in its incoherence. That they themselves were black, or that their own father had similarly relaxed habits was irrelevant. It was their contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult its teeth” (50). The idea of being made to feel “black and ugly” oneself or of ones race is a poison that breeds social inequalities long-term (51). (Anybody who’s seen Boys in the Hood knows that internalized racism and self-hatred manifests in the most tragic and horrifying ways).
What fascinates me the idea of ugliness and beauty as social signifiers of race and status. Claudia says: “Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window-signs—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child wanted” (14). “I could not love it,” she says; later, “I destroyed white baby dolls.” It is no surprise why. White baby dolls, and the white girls they are modeled after, represent the force of oppression that tells non-white girls that they are ugly.
Being called “ugly” is perhaps just as bad as being treated as a person without power and voice and agency. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison exposes the depth of injustice that results from a society plagued by racism and classism. Usually people think a couch is a couch, a lamp is a lamp—in short, it’s just furniture. But in the description of the torn couch incident (“you could hate a sofa, of course—that is, if you could hate a sofa”), all I can think about is the idea of being stripped of dignity (26). It is just downright wrong to treat another (human) being differently simply because of the color of their skin; I just imagine how I would feel if someone said “tough shit, buddy. Your tough shit….” (26).
On the thread of dignity…. When we think of factory farms, we count the numbers of slaughtered animals or watch videos of animals suffering inhumane and downright deplorable living conditions. Whether you see it with your own eyes or read statistics, you see speciesism practiced physically. That is, animal cruelty exercised with coercive and violent force. Yes, this was and still is also the case with regard to racist practices. The criminalization of the black man today is a practice that continues to thrive today; the number of people of color on death row—state sanctioned murder—confirms this without a doubt. But neither of these two mediums of communication capture, quantify (is it possible?), or qualify the feeling of being degraded and stripped of one’s sense of self, family, manhood, and dignity. Similarly, on the topic of dignity, I wonder if it is possible to treat animals with dignity and still use their labor and their meat. If we compare the institution of slavery to factory farming, then, besides the obvious question of freedom and rights, perhaps the common thread is lack of dignity.
I am fascinated by Pecola’s fascination with eyes—blue eyes; this brings me back…
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| Blue eye--the Bluest Eye. http://www.psychologytoday.com/files/u15/Blue_eye.jpg |
Every time I visit the rural coastal regions of Oaxaca, Mexico, I am reminded that I have blue eyes. It seems rather ridiculous to forget, but it’s like forgetting that your skin color speaks volumes in a racist, color-coded society. (There is such thing as white privilege). Beautiful women with chestnut brown skin and dark eyes (women, whose appearance made me insanely jealous) would approach me to look at my eyes. As if somehow they represented worth, value, or something awe-inspiring. I never thought about what their attraction to my eyes was until I studied race relations more thoroughly. Now I don’t even think they liked my eyes for their color, but rather for what they represented in society. In Mexico, given it’s history of Spanish colonization and conquest, the powerful conqueror was marked by white skin and likely light colored eyes. Blue eyes are considered valuable, beautiful, superior—but also, are a reminder of race, racial tensions, and a history of race violence.
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