Whiteness and Blackness in The Bluest Eye

Abstract

Toni Morrison has long proposed that the concept of physical beauty is one of the most destructive ideologies of human thought. This essay aims to deal with how Morrison’s 1970 novel The Bluest Eye exposes the dogma that physical beauty and pureness itself are straightforwardly associated with whiteness; allowing whiteness to provide a cloak of invisibility to those who possess it. This then subjects blackness to be the placeholder of what is ugly, bad and dangerous in the world; forcing the trait of blackness to be a conviction of visibility. This essay will follow myself, a white individual, grappling with the fact that I have been given the privilege to go through life unnoticed only because I happened to be born white. Further, the repercussions of this fact are confronted, those who are black are stripped from the privilege of going unnoticed. The Bluest Eye and my mediation of the novel present that even a raised consciousness about the privileges of whiteness fails to prevent racial self-loathing and violence against Blacks due to whiteness taking over the measure of humanness. Despite this, there is still hope in the future of blackness which can only be accomplished by displacing the authority of whiteness and questioning the structures that allow the authority of whiteness to prevail.