The Impacts of White-Dominated Media on Blacks in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye
The Impacts of White-Dominated Media on Blacks in The Bluest Eye
Media has always been a great influence on people thoughts. In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison cites such organization as one of the major factors which not only creates degrading stereotypes of the African Americans, but also establishes a feeling of self-hatred within the people themselves. Toni Morrison portrays the prejudiced media in America drawn by white-domination contributes internalized racism in African Americans bringing in the dislike of their own skin color, the preference for white lifestyle, and the identity crisis.
The media generates the notion that dark skin is unattractive. Toni Morrison points out the one of the main reasons why beauty of dark skin is overlooked. African Americans never have opportunity to expose the beauty of their people for the media features only white people. Movies, advertisement, and toys display merely white standard of beauty. Throughout the novel, the writer refers to this subject matter. For example, Claudia, an African American girl receives a blonde doll for her birthday of which she is not very fond. In addition, in movies, mostly white actors or actresses like Jean Harrow and Clark Gable are featured. From all these evidences, we can see that all the representatives of beautiful people in the media are white. No blacks involve. When these happen, blacks have no role-models on the media that would assure the attraction within them. During the 40s where the story takes place, there were black entertainers, but racism impeded their chance to become as successful as white ones. Perhaps by exemplifying the media displaying only white people, Morrison intends to criticize such unfairness. The novel reveals that the black entertainers are not very well-known enough in black communities, so the popular stars, even to the blacks, are white. Consequently, they have no representatives of their heritage in the media to prove that beauty is not all about whites.
Media has always been a great influence on people thoughts. In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison cites such organization as one of the major factors which not only creates degrading stereotypes of the African Americans, but also establishes a feeling of self-hatred within the people themselves. Toni Morrison portrays the prejudiced media in America drawn by white-domination contributes internalized racism in African Americans bringing in the dislike of their own skin color, the preference for white lifestyle, and the identity crisis.
The media generates the notion that dark skin is unattractive. Toni Morrison points out the one of the main reasons why beauty of dark skin is overlooked. African Americans never have opportunity to expose the beauty of their people for the media features only white people. Movies, advertisement, and toys display merely white standard of beauty. Throughout the novel, the writer refers to this subject matter. For example, Claudia, an African American girl receives a blonde doll for her birthday of which she is not very fond. In addition, in movies, mostly white actors or actresses like Jean Harrow and Clark Gable are featured. From all these evidences, we can see that all the representatives of beautiful people in the media are white. No blacks involve. When these happen, blacks have no role-models on the media that would assure the attraction within them. During the 40s where the story takes place, there were black entertainers, but racism impeded their chance to become as successful as white ones. Perhaps by exemplifying the media displaying only white people, Morrison intends to criticize such unfairness. The novel reveals that the black entertainers are not very well-known enough in black communities, so the popular stars, even to the blacks, are white. Consequently, they have no representatives of their heritage in the media to prove that beauty is not all about whites.