The Bluest Eye

Throughout history, there has been an ideal beauty that most people have tried to obtain. Is this beauty impossible to grasp? Is there anything to be “beautiful”? What if one is already of their ugliness, uselessness, and dirtiness. For Pecola Breedlove, the protagonist of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, this state of longing was reality. Blue eyes, blonde hair, and pale white skin was the definition of beauty. Pecola was a black girl with the dream to be beautiful. Toni Morrison takes the reader into the life of a young girl through Morrison’s exceptional novel, The Bluest Eye. She brings the reader through the themes of whiteness and beauty, racism and stereotypes. Our constant consumption of the media send us this message; beauty is the based of whiteness.

One manifestation of white supremacy is the use of whiteness as the standard of beauty. When whiteness is considered superior, white people are considered more attractive by definition and, insofar as the appearance of people of other races deviates from that standard, they are considered ugly. Even now, society still use the whiteness as the standard of beauty. The definition of beauty is clearly show by the media that people consume daily. The advertisement below is a nice illustration of the way in which black women, in particular, are expected to look white in order to qualify as beautiful. Seemingly, in the pictures, the company is showing the beauty of both black and white women. However, the reader gets a very narrow image of what a beautiful black woman is supposed to look like. Due to the standard of whiteness, people pay more attention to white model instead of black model. So while many black women do look like