Blue Eyed Baby Doll Analysis

Apart from media the girls in the novel came in contact with this white beauty stereotypes since a very young age:

It had begun with Christmas and the gift of dolls. The big, the special, the loving gift was always a big, blue-eyed Baby Doll. From the clucking sounds of adults I knew that the doll represented what hey thought was my fondest wish. (14)

Litlle black girls receive white blue-eyed dolls as a gift for christmas and these dolls look nothing like them, so as a consequence of this they may think that there is something wrong with them and this will eventually lead them to think that they are ugly. For this reason giving them blue-eyed dolls is a way of planting the seed of self-hatred in the minds of this youngsters. On the novel there isn't any attempt from the black community to claim their "right" to be beautiful too. We will have to wait for almost two decades for the "Black is beautiful" movement to break this homogeneity and end the reign of the white standards of beauty.
Far from promoting self-empowerment, the kids at school learn to read with a book known as the "Dick and Jane primer" this primer shows an idyllic representation of the white family causing a juxtaposition of the fictions of the white educational process and the reality of the life of many young black children. In other words, they are not represented in the culture and values shown on the book. Since this is a book used by children to learn how to read it implies that their first contact with language is bound with the ideological values it