The Bluest EyeEssay Preview: The Bluest EyeReport this essayThe Bluest Eye is a very important novel in literature, because of the many boundaries that were crosses and the painful, serious topics that were brought into light, including racism, gender issues, Black female Subjectivity, and child abuse of many forms. This set of annotated bibliographies are scholarly works of literature that centre around the hot topic of racism in the novel, піÐThe Bluest EyeпіЅ, and the low self-esteem faced by young African American women, due to white culture. My research was guided by these ideas of racism and loss of self, suffered in the novel, by the main character Pecola Breedlove. This text generates many racial and social-cultural problems, dealing with the lost identity of a young African American women, due to her obsession with the white way of life, and her wish to have blue eyes, leading to her complete transgression into insanity.
[Updated: The Bluest Eye has been removed, please look for the original copy in English and Portuguese] • • ______________________________________________.
The Bluest Eye is the first novel that explores the way African American victims of the War on Drugs are treated in a public forum—the way men and women talk about the drug trade, and in their personal lives. It’s one of the rare literary works that discusses the way men and women were treated by law enforcement in their efforts to get rid of the drugs.
The novel opens with an excerpt from the documentary, Black and White: Race in a New York City Law Enforcement Context (2005). It speaks to two black police officers: one about his son, Michael’s racial history, and the other about the history of drug use in the city, as we encounter the relationship between the police and people, or “officials,” in the 1970s. At the time, the police had to deal with numerous “drug-related and other law enforcement incidents” as “socially and racially problematic” and, as one cop explained, “under federal civil rights law, drug users and addicts must be treated in a “reasonable manner” for an act of violence.” On June 8, 2006, the National Lawyers Guild issued a memo (pdf) to local and national journalists in Los Angeles that found the police had been negligent in a number of ways, and that these cases led to the death of another black man on Long Island, one whom they blamed on a “drug dealer” (Sandra Diaz-Balart, a former Drug Enforcement Agency commander) and her family. The memo is a key document in the fight against the black epidemic that has left the country with an epidemic of drug misuse and abuse, as well as the black incarceration rate. At the very least, it has led to the death of two black soldiers that were killed by a gang of drug users and addicts that was in the public spotlight at the time.
*** The article contains an extremely unbalanced set of citations:
“At the end of the day: the drug wars are mostly part of white culture,” argues J.G. Bader. “In the book, [the] public is divided on just who makes up the criminal groups and who is responsible for the drug war.” The idea that the media has no role in the drug epidemic is an implicit assumption that has been placed upon us for years. But a new research paper shows that, at a minimum, the public isn’t quite yet as informed. … When asked about the racial gap in criminal activity before the war began, for instance, 43% agreed that the race of suspects or suspects in drug charges was irrelevant to the decision at the time. Meanwhile, 30% and 24% disagreed, and only 32% cited the jury trial and verdict as part of the issue. (In contrast, the national study found only 35% agreed that both criminal and juvenile drug offenders were involved in the drug trade; in other words, the public was less likely than researchers would have believed.) The problem, then, must be addressed first as a public-policy issue rather than as part — even as it is an issue that is being covered in the press, and the public has responded. In short, we must address the public’s perception of the problems that racial minorities face in a racially charged society. …”
The essay, “The Bluest Eye Is a New Book”: Black and White: Race in a New York City Law Enforcement Context” was published in June 2004 in the New York Times, The Guardian, New York Times, and Washington Post (online, print,
For my research, there was no specific parameter set on the range of dates in my research. The researched sources used in this set of bibliographies date between 1987 to 2003. These annotations will be found most useful by high school and post-secondary undergraduate students who are researching similar topics to the ones outlined in my study. The resources used are very intellectual, but not overly complicated or hard to understand. There were few limitations set towards the type of resources used, although Internet sources were avoided for the most part. Most of the resources used in this set of annotated bibliographies are articles, essays, and chapters from book-length studies, found mostly at the Queen Elizabeth II library. Trends that can be noticed in these entries are the main focal point, which the authors all seemed to cover, that is racism and the social-cultural problems created for young African American women. Many of the authors seemed to blame white culture, or the colourist culture for the problem of lost identity in black girls.