Racism In The Bluest Eye Essay

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The Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison Book Review, When hating yourself, destroys you

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In the first section of the novel, the origin story of the Bottom is revealed as well as how it got its name: a white farmer promised freedom and a piece of Bottom land to his slave if he would perform some difficult chores for him. Upon completion, the farmer regrets his end of the bargain. Freedom was easy, the farmer had no objection to that, but he did not want to give up the land. He tells the slave he was very sorry that he had to give him valley land, for he had hoped to give him a piece of the bottom land. The slave said he thought valley land was bottom land, to which the master said land on the hill, not the valley, was bottom land, rich and fertile" Morrison 5.

This is obviously untrue, but it is the story that black people told to illuminate the fact that white people's racism and lies have created this topsy turvy world in which up is down and down is up. The story is organized by chronological chapters labeled with years. In "," the first named character, handsome Shadrack, a previous resident of the Bottom, returns from World War I a shattered man, suffering from shell shock or PTSD and unable to accept the world he used to belong in.

Living in the outskirts of town and attempting to create order in his life, he develops methods such as keeping his shack in hospital-grade neatness. Another method is the invention of National Suicide Day, which exists on January 3rd to counter and compartmentalize the constant death he saw at war, and is essentially invitation for anyone that plans to die within the next year, to die on that day.

Never assimilating, he curses even at children and whites, has regular acts of indecency, but also does odd jobs and sells fish to the townspeople and is begrudgingly woven into the urban fabric, which is this town's version of acceptance. In "" and "," the narrator contrasts the families of the children Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who both grow up with no father figure. Nel, the product of a mother knee deep in social conventions, grows up in a stable home. Nel is initially torn between the rigid conventionality of her mother Helene Wright, who dislikes Sula's family instantly, and her inherent curiosity with the world, which she discovers on a trip.

Her vow to venture out when she is older is juxtaposed by the reader being informed that not once did she leave the Bottom after that trip. This experience ultimately prompts Nel to begin a friendship with Sula. The Peace family is the opposite: she lives with her grandmother Eva and her mother Hannah, both of whom are seen by the town as eccentric, loose, yet Hannah was genuinely loved by all men, and Eva was very respected by all women. Their house serves as a home for three informally adopted boys and a steady stream of boarders. The extremely strained relationship between Hannah and Eva is revealed.

Despite their differences, Sula and Nel become fiercely attached to each other in adolescent friendship. They share every part of their lives. This includes a memory of an accidental traumatic event; One day, they playfully swing a neighborhood boy, Chicken Little, around by his hands. Sula loses her grip and he falls into a nearby river and drowns. They do not tell anyone of the event, and though Sula grieves with guilt, Nel feels a light happiness, which is implicitly revealed to be unspoken pride, because she has secretly decided that the event is Sula's fault and that she does not share the blame at all. What complicates things is Shadrack's shack, which has a direct view of the incident. To find out if he saw, Sula visits it alone and is surprised at its orderliness, but she is unable to ask the question through her tears.

He comforts her and she runs away, accidentally leaving her belt, which Shadrack hangs on his wall as a sole ornament and memorandum of his only visitor. One day, Hannah tries to light a fire outside and her dress catches fire. Eva sees this happening from upstairs and jumps out the window in an attempt to smother the flames to save her daughter's life. An ambulance comes, but Hannah dies en route to the hospital, and her mother is injured as well. The incident proves Eva's fierce love for her daughter despite previous tension. Sula, however, had stood on the porch and watched her mother burn. Other residents of the Bottom suggest perhaps Sula was stunned by the incident, but Eva believes she stood and watched because she was "interested".

Nel chooses to marry, which implicitly breaks the bond of the girls who promised to share everything. Sula follows a wildly divergent path and lives a life of ardent independence and total disregard for social conventions. Shortly after Nel's wedding, Sula leaves the Bottom for a period of 10 years. She has many affairs and attends college. When she returns to the Bottom and to Nel, now a conventional wife and mother, they reconcile briefly.

The rest of the town, however, regard Sula as the very personification of evil for her blatant disregard of social conventions. His point is that they should not rely on God for the elimination of injustice on earth. A philosopher heavily influenced by Du Bois, Fanon, and Jones is Lewis Gordon , who argues that black existential philosophy "is marked by a centering of what is often known as the 'situation' of questioning or inquiry itself. Another term for situation is the lived- or meaning-context of concern. Implicit in the existential demand for recognizing the situation or lived-context of Africana people's being-in-the-world is the question of value raised by people who live that situation.

A slave 's situation can only be understood, for instance, through recognizing the fact that a slave experiences it. It is to regard the slave as a value-laden perspective in the world". The first asks the question, What is a human being? The second asks how can one become free. And the third is critical even of the methods used to justify the first two. Gordon argues that these questions make sense because enslaved, colonized, and dehumanized people are forced to question their humanity. That leads to questioning the meaning of being human. He argues that concerns with liberation make sense for people who have been enslaved, colonized, and racially oppressed. Because these questions are posed as objects of inquiry and demand the transformation of consciousness such as the transition from Du Bois's first form of double consciousness to the second, critical one, Gordon advocates a black existential phenomenological approach, which he sometimes call a postcolonial phenomenology or a decolonial one.

A philosopher influenced by Gordon is Nelson Maldonado-Torres, whose Against War Duke University Press, offers a "decolonial reduction" of the forms of knowledge used to rationalize slavery, colonialism, and racism. There is also the growing area of black feminist existential philosophy. Foundations of this area of thought are in the 19th-century and early 20th-century thought of Anna Julia Cooper, who explored problems of human worth through challenging the double standards imposed upon black populations in general and black women in particular. She argued, in response to the racist claims of black worthlessness that the world would be better off without black people , that the measure of worth should be based on the difference between contribution and investment.

Since very little was actually invested in black people but so much was produced by them, she argued that black worth exceeds that of many whites. She used the same argument to defend the worth of black women. More recently in the academy, black feminist existential philosophy is taken up by Kathryn Gines , founder of the Collegium of Black Feminist Philosophers. Ralph Ellison 's Invisible Man , the archetype of black existentialist literature, is one of the most revered and reviewed novels written by an African-American writer.

The namelessness of the main character of the novel, a figure based on Ellison's own life, points to the trauma of black people receiving names that were forced on them from the violence of slavery. That renaming was meant to inaugurate a loss of memory, and that process of dismemberment is explored in the novel as the protagonist moves from one abusive father figure to another—white and black—to a culminating reflection on living as an invisible leech off of the system that produces light. In Ellison's novel, the only black characters who seemed somewhat free were those designated insane, as in the famous scene at the Golden Day bar where a group from an insane asylum became the critical voice early in the novel.

Dismayed with his experience of American racism in the south, Wright sought refuge in a Parisian life. The existential novels that he wrote after leaving the United States, such as The Outsider , never received the high critical acclaim of Native Son. In his famous introduction to Native Son , Wright made concrete some of the themes raised by Du Bois. He pointed to the injustice of a system in which police officers randomly arrested young black men for crimes they did not commit and prosecutors who were able to secure convictions in such cases. He also argued that Bigger Thomas, the anti-hero of the novel, was produced by such a system and is often envied by many as a form of resistance to it. Wright's insight portended the emergence, for example, of the contemporary black "gangsta," as portrayed in gangsta rap.

In retrospect, James Baldwin has been considered by others as a black existentialist writer; however he was quite critical of Richard Wright and suspicious of his relationship with French intellectuals. Baldwin also brought questions of interracial and bisexual relationships into consideration and looked at the question of suffering as a struggle to defend the possibility of genuine human relationships in his novel Another Country. The writings of Toni Morrison are also contributions to black existentialism. Her novel The Bluest Eye examines how "ugliness" and "beauty" dominate black women's lives as imitations of white women as the standard of beauty. Her famous novel Beloved raises the question of the trauma that haunts black existence from slavery.

In , Anderson joined W. Du Bois in forming the Krigwa Players, a troupe of Black actors performing plays by Black playwrights. The group produced numerous plays, including several written by Anderson under her pen name of Ursula Trelling. Presented in , her play Climbing Jacob's Ladder, about a Black man being lynched while people prayed for him, led to Broadway roles for many of the actors. Daisy Bates November 11, - November 4, was a Black American journalist and civil rights activist best known for her role in the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Born in the tiny sawmill town of Huttig, Arkansas in , Daisy Bates was raised in a foster home, her mother having been raped and murdered by three white men when she was three years old. Learning at age eight that no one was prosecuted for her mother's murder and that the police had largely ignored the case, Bates vowed to dedicate her life to ending racial injustice. Along with serving as editor, Bates regularly wrote articles for the paper. When the U. Supreme Court declared segregated public schools unconstitutional in , Bates rallied Black American students to enroll in all-white schools across the South, including those in Little Rock.

Often driving them to school herself, she protected and advised the nine students, known as the Little Rock Nine. Gwendolyn Brooks June 7, - December 3, was a widely read and much-honored poet and author who became the first Black American to win a Pulitzer Prize. Born in Topeka, Kansas, Brooks moved with her family to Chicago when she was young.

Her father, a janitor, and her mother, a schoolteacher and classically trained pianist, supported her passion for writing. While attending junior college and working for the NAACP, Brooks began writing the poems describing the realities of the urban Black experience that would comprise her first anthology, A Street in Bronzeville, published in In , her second book of poetry, Annie Allen, portraying the struggles of a young Black girl growing into womanhood while surrounded by violence and racism was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. At age 68, Brooks became the first Black woman to be appointed as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, the position now known as Poet Laureate of the United States.

When the family moved to a white neighborhood in , they were attacked by neighbors, leaving only after being ordered to do so by a court. Her father appealed to the U. Supreme Court, which in its famous Hansberry v. Lee decision declared racially restrictive housing covenants illegal. Hansberry attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison majoring in writing, but withdrew after two years and moved to New York City. While her articles on feminism and homophobia openly exposed her lesbianism, she wrote under her initials, L. Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? With a run of performances, it was the first Broadway play written by a Black American woman.

Toni Morrison February 18, - August 5, was an American novelist and college professor noted for her understanding and skill in relating the Black female experience through her writing. Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio, to a family with a deep appreciation for Black culture and history. She received a B. From to , she taught at Howard.

From to , she worked as a fiction editor at Random House Books. From until her retirement , she taught writing at the State University of New York in Albany. Though it has been praised as a classic novel, it has also been banned by several schools due to its graphic details. Her critically acclaimed novel Beloved, is based on the tragic true story of a runaway enslaved woman who chooses to kill her infant daughter to save her from a life of enslavement. Audre Lorde February 18, - November 17, was a Black American poet, writer, feminist , womanist , and civil rights activist. Born to West Indian immigrant parents in New York City, Lorde published her first poem in Seventeen magazine while still in high school. After working as a librarian in the New York public schools throughout the s, she taught as the poet-in-residence at historically Black Tougaloo College in Mississippi.

I felt so sick. I felt as if I would drive this car into a wall, into the next person I saw. I will never be gone. I am a scar, a report from the frontlines, a talisman, a resurrection. A rough place on the chin of complacency. She was also friends with the young Black girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing of She was fired as an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles for her membership in the Communist Party.

A strong supporter of prison reform, Davis took up the cause of three Black inmates. In , guns belonging to Davis were used in an attempt to help the inmates escape from a California courtroom. In , Davis co-founded Critical Resistance, an organization dedicated to ending the prison industrial complex. Davis has also authored several books on classism, feminism, racism, and injustices within the U. Alice Walker born February 9, is an American poet, essayist, novelist, and social activist, who focuses on the issues of racism, gender bias, classism, and sexual oppression. Alice Walker was born in in Eatonton, Georgia, to sharecropping farmers. When she was eight, she was involved in a BB gun accident that left her permanently blinded in her left eye.

In , she published her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, the story of a Black tenant farmer who, driven by the futility of life in the segregated South, deserts his wife and son to go North. Adapted into a popular movie by Steven Spielberg, the book tells the story of a year-old Black girl in rural Georgia whose children are given away by her sexually-abusive father, also the father of her children, who is also the father of the children. Along with the Pulitzer Prize, she has won an O. Henry Award and a National Book Award.

She decided then to write under her pen name, the name of her grandmother. She earned a B. Since , hooks has published dozen of books while teaching at four major universities. In , she became a professor at Berea College, a tuition-free, liberal arts college in Kentucky.