Paper 2

Several weeks ago, I sat in the break room at my job, and I was reading the novel, The Bluest Eye before finishing my lunch break. One of my coworkers, Paige, walked in and sat down with a Subway sandwich. She looked over at me and, noticing the book in my hands, asked what I was reading. Her ears perked and her eyes brightened when I told her the title and author. As a young black woman and student at Langston University, Paige was familiar with Toni Morrison and her other works, but had not heard of The Bluest Eye. I have known Paige for four years, and that day we had a conversation I had never shared with her before. Paige told me about the feelings she had toward white girls when she was younger. She told me that until she was about 15 years old, she wanted to be white, because she saw it as beautiful. “We all do, but eventually you grow out of it and accept yourself,” she said. She said it wasn’t until she became a student at Langston that those feelings completely disappeared. Although Paige is now happy and comfortable with her black features, she said she still feels animosity towards couples of black men and white women. “It’s like he didn’t even give a black girl a chance,” she said. Paige and I both learned something about each other that day and our relationship changed. She looks at me in a different way now, maybe because I listened and I tried to understand. I found it shocking, even after reading the novel and watching Precious that black girls actually felt that way about their features. I don’t know if I will ever fully understand that feeling, and I probably won’t, but now I feel like I have taken a step in the right direction.
My experience was only a real-life example of the issues addressed in the novel and the movie. Precious and Pecola are two very complex young girls with some very complex problems. Although I’m sure the case is similar with both girls, Pecola’s situation seems to be the result of generations of problems in the black community that all affect each other. “This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live.” (Morrison, 206) In this particular quote, Morrison was referring to the soil of the earth, and why flowers did not grow. This is instead a comment on society, and why the flowers of Pecola and even Precious could not grow. Society does not nurture all life, some life is destroyed by it. Generations of black women have questioned their own beauty, not because their petals were not beautiful and colorful, but because society told them to believe that they were not. Society has taken it upon itself to murder the self-esteems of millions of young women every day and instead of changing, does not even take the blame. Pecola and Precious lived inside my friend, Paige, but Paige outgrew them or maybe stopped listening. The question is, do they still live inside her, waiting to infect the minds of Paige’s children? Without changes in society, girls like Pecola and Precious will still exist. We must learn to put pressure on our media to be responsible and give strength to young girls instead of taking it away from them.
To Pecola and Precious, the white features they coveted represented beautiful, successful, never to be teased again. To be white on the outside, meant to live a differently life, separate from their own. Lee Damsky wrote of her ugliness in her essay, “In the interim, part of me still believed that my appearance was a visible manifestation of my deeper internal ugliness - isn’t this the logical extension of our culture’s assumption that physical beauty symbolizes everything good and desirable?” Damsky’s assumption of her own beauty mirrors that of Pecola and Precious. Their white images of themselves represented everything good they wanted, their black features represented everything negative that came their way. The mother of one black boy in the novel did everything she could to set herself - a colored person - apart from the lower class “niggers,” who were “dirty and loud.” Within this culture, she tried to be as close to white as she could be without actually being white.
The titles of the two girls’ stories are significant, each in their own way. The Bluest Eye represents Pecola’s struggle to become the most beautiful girl. Even after she achieved her goal of having blue eyes - the perfect ideal of beautiful, she was still worried that they were not the bluest eyes on the earth. She has anxiety about this and asks her “friend” to look at the eyes of everyone they pass, just so she can be sure they are the bluest of blue eyes. It appears that Pecola will never be truly happy with herself. In the case of Precious, the girl of the same name seems to feel anything but precious. She is despised. Perhaps, it is representative of the fact that all life is precious, no matter what color the skin is that holds it.
Neither girls’ story ends on a high note, although Precious leaves us with a slightly more hopeful example. To start, as Precious walked past a mirror near the end of the movie, she saw herself in the mirror: a large leap from where she was at the beginning, seeing a white girl brushing her blond hair instead of her own reflection. Precious confronts her mother and finally takes a stand for herself. So much of the movie is spent by Precious biting her tongue and speaking under her breath. After hearing the story of her own molestation at three years old, she took control of her life and took her children vowing to not let that happen to them. The film leaves the audience hanging, but images of Precious walking proudly through the streets of New York City with her head held high fill the screen. Of course, once the audience remembers Precious’s fatal illness, the small victories seem almost insignificant, yet still monumental for Precious. Pecola, on the other hand, never had her own epiphany. Mesmerized by her own “blue eyes,” she drove herself mad. Perhaps the only way she knew how to deal with her situation was to retreat inside her own head, where life could be lived the way she wanted it to be. I think each woman went on to live a continuous struggle with their body image, but none of us ever truly get over our insecurities.
Not all images in our society are negative toward black women. Proctor and Gamble recently launched its “My Black is Beautiful” campaign, encouraging black women to embrace their black features and see them as beautiful rather than ugly. This kind of positive message is one that we need to see more of. Not just for black women, but for all minorities.


In the above advertisement, two black women are depicted in an airplane. I take no issue (necessarily) with the actual content of the advertisement, but rather the styling. Both black women have blond hair, which we all know is not a natural hair color for black women. The woman in front appears to have a great deal of status, while the stewardess appears to want that status, she even totes the same blond locks. Perhaps even more damaging to black women is not necessarily ads depicting them in a negative light, rather the ads that leave black women out all together. With little to no example of beauty within their own culture, where are black women going to look for what is beautiful? In the pages of magazines, where the black female is almost nonexistent unless she is depicted as a wild animal. In order for black women to move up in our society and to stop believing that the only beautiful is white, we must show them what beautiful black women look like, and that they do exist.