Prejudice In The Bluest Eye By Toni Morrison

The Bluest Eye tells the story of a young black girl growing up in the United States during the late 1930’s and early 40’s. Toni Morrison does an outstanding job of painting a realistic depiction of what life would have been like for a black person back then with almost no original named white characters. Instead, she creates a gradient of shades of black characters and shows how racism was internalized among black people. There are different ways is how she shows this, whether by age of the character being depicted or by the degree of blackness they present as. The original characters in The Bluest Eye are used as mechanism to show how internalized racism manifests and the scale on how much black people were taught to despise their own blackness.
As a young, dark skinned, black girl, though not as dark as Pecola, we get to see just how internalized racism begins. As she said in the beginning of the story, she has “not yet arrived at the turning point in the development of my psyche which would allow me to love her,” the her being Shirley Temple. To Claudia, Shirley Temple was everything that she was not. She knew that a bright blue eyed, yellow haired, fair skinned, white girl was what everyone was taught to love but she did not understand why. Even at her young age, Claudia knew that people looked down on her for something that she could not control and that it was not her fault that others might not like her for unfounded reasons. Despite all of the similar traits between her and Pecola, the one thing she has that stops her from falling into the same path as her friend is her family and her ability to distinguish the miniscule difference between hate and
Breedlove. Like the rest of her family, Mrs. Breedlove is dark skinned and therefore is considered ugly. On top of this, even when she once might have been considered beautiful by some, this changed after she obtained her lame foot. It is because of this that she thought herself to be unlovable and why she jumped at her chance to marry when Cholly showed interest. Despite knowing that she does not fit into the white standard of beauty, Mrs. Breedlove still tries to model herself after the famous white women she sees in the films like Jean Harlow. She attempted to do her hair up like theirs even though she knew the texture of their hair was vastly different than hers. Mrs. Breedlove tried her hardest to meet the white standard of beauty, and when that failed, she became the best stereotype there was for black women in her time, a mammie. She decided to give up on her family because her husband did not love her anymore, her son had run off due to their constant fighting, and her daughter had been born ugly and claimed to have been raped by her own father. She based what she thought was the perfect look, life, love off of what she saw in the cinema. An almost completely white washed cinema. In a way, Mrs. Breedlove is the perfect example of how The Bluest Eye shows how racism was internalized by black women