Racism and Representation of Racialized Beauty in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

The American novelist Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye portrays black society and deals with the themes of black victimization and racial oppression. It presents a prolonged representation of the means in which the standards of internalized white beauty contort the life and existence of black women. This paper explores and elucidates the impact of race, racial oppression and representation in The Bluest Eye . And how racism also edifices the hatredness between Blackand White communities. This paper will discuss various issues and concepts such as Race, Race in the Colonial Period, Racializing the Other and Stereotyping. The paper also deals with understanding Representation through the ideas of Saussure, Barthes, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Geertz, and Said. Racism is primarily a belief in the supremacy and dominance of one race upon another that consequences in the differences, discrimination and prejudice of people towards one another rooted and established on their race or ethnicity. Racism has deeply affected the African-American coloured people making them feel inferior. The Bluest Eye reflects the appalling effect on blacks individualising the values of a white culture that rejects them both immediately and incidentally. Even after abolition of slavery legally still the African-Americans faces the cruelty of racial discrimination and never considered equal to the whites. The Black people struggles to ascertain themselves with the white and their ethnic ways. Toni Morrison propounds on black cultural heritage and seeks the African-Americans to be gratified and proud of their black colour as well black identity. This paper conveys the essence of the coloured people’s fight for their race, and also its continuance and forbearance in a principally multicultural White dominated America.


Introduction
Race can be defined as the scabrous cleaving of humans on the basis of anatomy, used as a modern term in the milieu of nation or ethnic group. It is also explicated as an identifiable group of people sharing a common descent, qualities associated to birth, where people nurture in a specific and distinct society and achieve social norms of the society, such as the Indo-Aryan, the Mongoloid, the Dravidian, etc. Research also says that there has been impact of climateon physical features, nature and behaviour.
There are different vital moments when the west experienced the black people and portrayed them through various discourses. The connection and dealings between the European traders and the West African realm which dispensed the black slaves for three centuries permitted rising of the black slavery. Another major reason could be the European colonization of African countries. The most important cause is the migrations of the people post-world war II from the third world countries into Europe and North America.
Various other things that plays role in this field are the concepts like exclusion, fantasy, power, otherness and stereotyping. Stereotyping evolves from the word typing which According to him, Representation is related with creation of knowledge and not just meaning.
He says that, discourses such as the customs, practices, traditions, rituals, symbolic objects, motifs, myths, patterns, folktales and popular culture produces knowledge and not just meaning. He associates knowledge with power.
Culture carries its own perception on the notion of beauty. Beauty is measured and its measurement is certainly not committed as it rests on how a person sees, contemplates and presume. The standards of beauty keep changing as per the environment and society. In Afro-American heritage and society, racialised beauty has inimical limpact in the lives and relationships of the people. The Bluest Eye deals with this discrimination in stipulations of beauty and race, the core themes in the novel. The young girl protagonist in the novel is too young, and as she grows up, she realises her ugliness and blackness, which is the extreme despicable fact of race relations. and is forced to believe that she is ugly and her misery is her ugliness and being black. She starts fantasizing that if she would have been born white then she would have never been raped by her own father, would not been hated by her mother, would not have been isolated by her own community and would rather have been admired and adored by her family and society.
Pecola Breedlove is an instance and model of the injured and inimical image who is inadequately encircled by the standard of beauty, a norm and yardstick is being elevated in a Pecola's self-respect dearths any kind of worth or affirmation in the consideration of the 'Other' since her existence was absolutely unacknowledged. She was compressed into selfresistance, an emptiness denoting nothing, a complete lack of acceptance as a human being.
Pecola realizes that her failure of self is aligned to her blackness. Morrison writes: "All things in her are in flux and anticipation. But her blackness is static and dread. And it is the blackness that accounts for, that creates, the vacuum edged with distaste in white eyes". she picks Mary Jane's candy, not because of its taste, but because of its packaging bearing a picture of blonde, blue-eyed, beautiful Mary Jane. Above all, Pecola believes that she is one step closer to Mary Jane by consuming whiteness." (Morrison

90)
The traumatic impact and realisation of racialised beauty aggravates at Mrs. Breedlove's workplace that initiates Pecola's journey as a distressed child to psychosis. While Pecola accidentally strikes against a blueberry cobbler, rather than comforting Pecola, Mrs.
Breedlove reproves her, hits her and eases the Fisher girl. This incident proves her mother's predilection for the white people. Also Pauline didn't want to admit in front of the whites that Pecola is her own daughter. Morrison writes: Pick up that wash and get out of here, so I can get this mess cleaned up..... Mrs.
Breedlove rushed and calms the white girl. "Who were they Polly?" Hush don't worry none,' she whispered, and the honey in her words complemented the sundown spilling on the lake." (Morrison 107) An already disturbed, disappointed and rejected young girl Pecola accepts the fact that she is unwelcome, undesirable and unpleasant. The fact that ultimately drives Pecola to insanity is getting raped by her own father and carrying her father's child in her womb at the age of thirteen. This sad story of an exploited young girl is Morrison's opposition, dissent and protest against racism.
Pecola was betrayed by her own mother. She mentioned about the hateful rape but Mrs.
Breedlove did not believe her. We got to know this when Pecola talks to her imaginary friend being insane: disgusted, amused, shocked, outraged, or even excited by the story. But we listened to the one who would say, "Poor little girl," We looked for eyes creased with concern, but saw only veils." (Morrison,190 from brutality that she experiences in her real life, and thus triumphs in shielding herself from pain, suffering and heartbreak. At last, the insane mind of Pecola attains a pair of blue eyes, in her imagination.

Conclusion
Morrison indicates that the protagonist Claudia is a protest and challenge to the white beauty establishment. Through Claudia, Morrison defies the discernment of the concept of beauty of the Whites which generally believes that beauty represents only the blue-eyed, blonde-haired, and white-skinned. The authority, master and domination of the society were the Whites that restraints Claudia to confront the power of the white dictators around her.
Morrison by defying the Western standards of beauty opines that the standard of beauty is a societal construction. Morrison also exhibits that if whiteness is the yardstick of the standard of beauty, then the worth of blackness is depreciated. It is necessary for the entire human race to completely understand that culture holds, impacts and forms our worth and conviction.
Thus, taking into consideration the value of culture, people can aspire to struggle and prosper to their highest prospective. Through the character of Claudia, Morrison describes how the internalized racism can damage the people of a community. Morrison shoots up from the conventional heritage of African-American society, culture and literature and thus represents racism as an explicit evil.