Collective Voice In The Bluest Eye

Throughout history there is a reoccurring theme of oppression of minorities like the African American community during the Jim Crow era in the North American south. Thomas Dartmouth Rice created a popular theater show in the 1930’s that gave the Jim Crow era it’s name. In Rice’s shows, he painted a “black face” onto his white skin and danced around acting as a “buffon” African American named Jim Crow. He used comedy and an over exaggerated version of the African American english dialect to depict the Black community as intellectually inferior, lazy, and dangerous. These shows spread rapidly throughout the nation and elevated the derogatory view of the Black community.. The principle of segregation was promoted by many southern states in the
In The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, the main protagonist, Pecola Breedlove, is outcasted by the Black community of Lorain, Ohio and Morrison shows this through collective voice. Pecola is a young African American girl with very dark skin who thinks that if she could have blue eyes, she would be the White communities standards of pretty and treated like the other girls surrounding her. The Black community looks down on her and rejects her. One scene in The Bluest Eye when this is evident is when the characters Claudia and Frieda MacTeer and Maureen Peel are walking home from school and see Pecola surrounded by a group of young African American boys shouting at her “ Black e mo. Black e mo. Yadaddsleepnakked…” (The Bluest Eye 55). The boys“heady with the smell of their own musk, thrilled by the easy power of majority, they gaily harassed her”(The Bluest Eye 55). Morrison show’s collective voice in this scene by representing the attitudes of all the boys against Pecola in one scene by using words like “they” and having them all chant in unison. They are outcasting her from her own Black community by bullying her. Similarly to this scene, Morrison shows outcasting through collective voice in The Bluest Eye in many other scenes. Another scene where this is prevalent is when the character, Geraldine, outcasts Pecola because she is a member of the lower class Black community. Geraldine's son, Junior, enjoyed tormenting the lower class members of the Black community that his mother would not let him play with. One day when Pecola goes to play in a park, he invites her to his house where his mother's car is accidently killed. Geraldine comes home to see this and has a flashback where Pecola represents the entire poor Black community. This flashback shows collective voice because it represents the views of