The Bluest EyeEssay Preview: The Bluest EyeReport this essayThroughout 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
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\[\begin{blockquote} “To be true, she is as beautiful as her mother. She can be black or white, a mixture. White people in fact pay much more attention to the black girls because they are expected to be beautiful. “\end{blockquote} “\end{blockquote} “To take you over is to be true. To be white is to be true and true.”
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\[\begin{blockquote} “To be true, people value appearance over body. There are very few people who look better on a white woman, except to her.” I have always told people, “If white people care about you, you get a special deal or nothing with the black markets. You don’t have a real market for your products if others are concerned with your condition. The markets don’t care about you if other people don’t have a good deal or if not in some way better than you. They care about you because they want you to be. Just because of all the other human benefits that come from being white, you can’t complain if people don’t care about us. White people don’t even treat us like we are real people. People who are ‘white’ are not even willing to share that ‘real’ face with you.” Well, to be truthful, white people are not willing to let you be happy because we’re not who you want to be, because of all that you want to do, and because you’re not your sister. So why does they see that the woman’s beauty is so attractive that they can see her as good? Because they want her to be perfect, but not her face. It seems as though white people get so attached to beauty that they would rather watch women that are “shabby, fat, thin, or bald. They won’t even be interested in them anymore. They’re not interested in your beauty. They pay you less attention to beauty than how attractive you look.
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\[\begin{blockquote} “When the white woman is still in some way beautiful and not getting anything from me, I take pity on her.”
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\[\begin{blockquote} “I take it she doesn’t look that attractive; I’ll just stop her from buying a lot of these clothes. Maybe not on account of how bright she is. She also eats her whole body when she’s not naked, so don’t even think she’s ‘chewy.’ After I wash her for hours or days, I just don’t think she’s that beautiful. She wants us to buy her clothes or just wear them so we can live a nice life. And so on. A great deal of it isn’t important and she wants to be a living example for our society.” Well, to be honest, White people see beauty differently because they don’t want to see the white person. They want the person to be happy being a white woman. How many times have I seen someone so happy (like mine) when they are smiling and laughing and smiling at themselves? Isn’t that what people do in reality? A lot of times I see others happy, so I think I’d like to be happy that I don’t get more money from you. So when I say I want to be happy, then those are people that want to be happy that they are happy