Bluest Eye
Self-hatred Leads to Self-destructionÂ….
Internalized racism occurs both consciously and subconsciously. It can affect any race, group, or person, whether it be due to color, sexual status, or even medical issues. Basically, it occurs when a person begins to believe all of the negative stereotypes and images that come from other people, history, media, or any other sources that depict oppressing images which often lead to self-hatred of the person or group being oppressed. These images create the oppressed person or group as inferior, such as the white oppression against people of color.
Self-hatred is something that can thoroughly destroy an individual. As it was fictitiously evidenced in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, it can lead an individual to insanity. Toni Morrison raises the idea that racism and class can detrimentally influence people's outlook on themselves. All of the tragedies in this novel can be directed back to two main issues. Whiteness as a standard of beauty, and the internalized racism that occurs from this standard and oppression from white America. This epidemic, this illness, this belief that white sets the standards for beauty, is a major factor to the racial self-loathing, also known as internalized racism, which occurred in America in the past as well as today. The infiltration of internalized racism through white beauty, and the desires of the black society of Lorain, Ohio to acquire this beauty, led to the destruction of many characters in this book.
In the society that the Breedloves lived in, beauty had a lot to do with racism and the dominant class that influenced it. To be beautiful in that society you had to be blond hair, blue eyed and fair skinned. If you could not exactly look like that the closer you came to it the better you were viewed. You also had to behave in a certain manner: well groomed, soft spoken, and have high morals. In other words, you had to look like a stereotypical European and...
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