The Bluest Eye was published in 1970. At the time Morrison was writing the novel, the racist society that condemned Pecola Breedlove was still very much in place and Morrison took great risks – both within the black community and American society as a whole – to tell this important story. While advances in civil rights and racial attitudes have been made in the intervening years, it is arguable that many of the core issues so vividly evoked in the novel remain. What evidence is there that racial self-hatred continues to ruin lives? What present-day cultural factors could contribute to tragedies like Pecola’s?
kim.kovacs. Very well said. In addition to this, there are still racial violence and discrimination, overt as well as unconscious.
Present day cultural factors are increasing daily in this country.
Health care inequities particularly comes to mind. Black women have the highest maternal morbidity rate in the US. Is this evidence of racial “self” hatred, no but it reflects the stress that Blacks in this country face on a daily basis.
People experience self-hatred or self loathing
for many reasons, though most center around a person’s personality traits, mental health conditions, parenting, environment, and traumatic experiences.
Environments that reinforce or encourage negative beliefs, negative judgments, substance use, and destructive behaviors can contribute to feelings of self-hatred. In the Black culture and society, many of these have been past down through generations and society keeps reinforcing these beliefs. Lack of opportunities, employment, education and other social activities keep this perpetuated even now.
Traumatic experiences such as violence, sex crimes, racism, or other forms of discrimination, can cause individuals to internalize these acts, thinking of them as justified. The mistaken belief that traumatic experiences are earned or deserved can contribute to feelings of self-hatred. Racism has not changed, sometimes overt, subtle, or unconscious.
As in this novel, parenting styles, such as lacking parenting or more specifically, hypercritical parenting styles that provide unreasonably high expectations and unclear standards while modeling self-hatred can contribute to feelings of self-loathing, impacting kids well into adulthood. Often this is repeated from one generation to another as the way to raise a child. Which was the case of Maureen ( being mulatto; light skin and long hair; less offensive to whites) and Pecola and her friends (were different degrees of blackness) had low self-esteem and unworthiness. Many blacks deal with colorism within their culture, everyone wants to feel self-important or want to be included.
It’s crazy right now to compare past and present. In today’s world, at this very minute, it seems as if we have regressed. The difference is: we are better informed. Looking at the time period, this novel brought the readers back to slavery. Incest, ownership, blatant disregard for human life. At times ,I feel we are better at covering up our racial prejudices but they do exist. The side glance, the disrespect, the ignoring…we see signs everywhere, everyday. The self loathing aspect is in every culture, within every race. For some it is the way they were raised, their community, lack of opportunities, education and self worth.
I think there is racial hatred among some blacks and some whites. Guilt is plastered over blacks for just what they look like and over whites for how they treat non-whites. But the truth is some blacks treat some blacks with the same ideas of “ughly” and whites also class each other as “ughly”. Tragedy of Pecola goes into her family culture and her father’s own upbringing and feelings of inadequacy in the cultural mess we all have created, some of us purposely and some of us by neglect and fear to speak out.
It is all very sad and Morrison made her point. But this is the saddest book I ever read. I learned more about others and myself from the other books by Morrison that I have read before, almost all of them. Even the Holocaust did not produce such SELF-HATRED. And it is still prevalent today, god forgive us!! Janet A. Thomas
I could go on and on and on in response to this question. When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, I thought to myself that as a country we had made real progress in overcoming the racism that had permeated us from the time of Colombus’ arrival to our shores. The last 16 years have shown how wrong I was. Apparently the hate for anyone not of the same race, religion, sexual orientation, etc. has been palpating just under the surface all of the years since the 1960s. People were given permission to openly display their hate again beginning with the campaign for the 2016 presidential election. I can’t specifically say if persons of color in the USA feel self-hate as only they are in a position to confirm or deny that, but I’m confident that they feel the hate of many of the citizens of this country, up to and including the current executive branch of our government.
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That’s exactly how I felt, @Lana_Maskus. I was so happy that we might finally be making progress that I cried during his inauguration. It feels crushing to realize just how far our country is from achieving racial equality (or gender equality, for that matter). The last few years have been quite the revelation.