Brown Eyes in a Blue-Eyed World
"Thrown, in this way, into the binding conviction that only a miracle could relieve her, she would never know her beauty. She would see only what there was to see: the eyes of other people."
Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye was recently banned in Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, and Utah as book bans escalated throughout the 2022-23 school year—more than 50 years since the book's debut. But The Bluest Eye was already banned in North Carolina in 2012 when I was in high school.
The book has been banned from libraries and classrooms for containing "sexually explicit material," "lots of graphic descriptions and lots of disturbing language," and "an underlying socialist-communist agenda." More importantly, The Bluest Eye traverses themes of tumult and trauma and ultimately reveals how whiteness and antiblackness are antagonistic to the development, self-esteem, and overall well-being of Black children and adults. Now that I am an adult who can freely access this text, I see that The Bluest Eye also underscores how whiteness manifested in both my upbringing and my experience of being an emotionally neglected Black child reared by Black parents in an antiblack world.
One scene, in particular, maintains a heart-wrenching resonance with me as I reflect on my lived experience: There's Pecola, an abused child who almost everyone in her community considers ugly. While walking home, she is lured to Junior's house with the promise of seeing a kitten. Junior is an emotionally neglected child who bullies his girl peers to cope with the hatred he feels towards the cat that his mother, Geraldine, adores more than him. Geraldine is a manifestation of respectability politics and is emotionally disconnected from the familial life she's expected to uphold and maintain. So, she reserves her sincerest affection for her cat. A scuffle occurs between the children when Pecola displays gentleness toward the cat, the subject of Junior's abhorrence, with Junior revealing that his plan was to torture Pecola with the cat. Then, the poor animal gets slung against the wall by Junior right as Geraldine walks into the house. Chaos ensues and Pecola is eventually scapegoated. Geraldine tells her: "Get out. You nasty little black bitch. Get out of my house."
My mom was always the more dominant "disciplinary" figure in our household. To this day, my father does not feel comfortable wielding corporal punishment against children. That does not mean his lack of disciplinary involvement was a saving grace either—my mother was the enforcer and my father was the enabler. One day, my dad was getting me ready for a day of elementary school while my mom was screaming at my older sister in another room. As he scrambled to help me get ready so we could leave, we heard a loud crash. When we walked out into the dining room, my mom was on top of the dining table, shirt off, breathing heavily, and my older sister was on the floor in the corner, struggling to get back up. This would not be the last time things between my mother and sister got physical. My father, though, did nothing to stop it. In my story, similar to the scene with Geraldine, the villains were Black adults; they also happened to be my parents.
I remember my mom yelling at me about something when I was about 10 years old. I don't remember what that something was. I recall leaning against the dingy white walls in our apartment's hallway, crying and bracing for impact. Once she noticed me crying, she stooped down to look me in the eye. Calmly, she said, "You know I used to feel sorry for you when you would cry. But now your tears mean nothing to me." I stopped crying until well into adulthood after this interaction. A few years later, my dad joked that being raised by my mother is what helped me develop the "mental toughness" I utilized in my athletic career. It still pains me to think about this. I wonder why my parents were unable to see the compounding effects of their abuse and enabling behavior. But then I think about how both of my parents were born in 1968, the year of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. They were coming of age at the onset of the HIV/AIDS and crack epidemics. My father served in the US Army during the Gulf War in Operation DESERT STORM. I also happened to be born three years after the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, a.k.a. The 1994 Crime Bill, was passed and expanded the US carceral state (i.e. billions of dollars for prisons and police). My parents' carceral approach to parenting and caregiving makes more sense when placed in these larger contexts.
The Bluest Eye is set in a steel mill town in the Midwest during the 1940s. Toni Morrison describes how the light-skinned Geraldine, Pecola's dark-skinned mother, and the "ugly" Pecola are all fixated on society's beauty standards in an era when whiteness and proximity to it were explicitly tantamount to beauty and perfection. The characters are also experiencing life during an economic downturn before World War II. Due to the social realities of her world, Geraldine essentially leads a life that is socially acceptable and primed for security in marriage (i.e. adhering to the expectations of being a housewife, mother, and desirable figure). Unfortunately, she is wholly emotionally disconnected from her marriage and family, and the emotional connectivity she does express is reserved solely for her cat rather than her own child.
Black children and adults alike exist under structures designed to repress and destroy us for easier manipulation, domination, and control. However, while Black villainy can be cultivated in these conditions, we have to be holistic and honest with each other about how our collective worlds are engrossed by antiblack politics. The tendency for some people in our communities to perpetuate ideologies that ultimately support the systems oppressing us becomes better understood when we consider the conditions we live under and the antiblack myths we are taught—whether about beauty and belonging or corporal punishment and carcerality. Still, we must always work towards funneling our frustrations and actions toward the state, rather than solely scapegoating individuals.
Toward the end of the book, Pecola stops by to see pseudo-spiritualist and psychic reader Elihue Micah Whitcomb, or Soaphead Church, to see if he could change her eye color to blue. This request is, of course, literally impossible to achieve through spiritual means.
"Soaphead walked to the window, his back to the girl. His mind raced, stumbled, and raced again. How to frame the next sentence? How to hang on to the feeling of power? His eye fell on old Bob sleeping on the porch."
Soaphead convinces Pecola to make an "offering" to Bob, his landlord's dog. We learn that he has a profound hatred for this dog and so the "offering" in question is poisoned meat. He lies to her by claiming that, in making the offering and watching the behavior of this dog, she will determine if her wish to God is granted or not. If the dog behaved strangely then her wish was granted. Once Pecola gives the dog the meat, the dog immediately dies which convinces her—and Soaphead Church—that he caused a miracle. In reality, he simply preyed on the insecurities of a vulnerable child to do his dirty work. It is important to note that Soaphead is a light-skinned, biracial, West Indian man and his mixedness is the source of his false sense of superiority. Before he became the pseudo-spiritualist and psychic reader, he was a defamed preacher. Perhaps the "wish" he "granted" for Pecola strengthened his obsession with whiteness and purity and reaffirmed his delusions of grandeur that he was unable to maintain as a preacher.
After experiencing long-term trauma and emotional neglect, I too hoped that an external "magic" in the form of interpersonal relationships would restore and heal my self-worth, since I did not have the skills to meet my own needs. Now, I am clear on the fact that Black children shouldn't have to wish on a star, go to a spiritual scammer, or rely on codependent relationships to receive care and support in their emotionality.
I learned early in life that I had to be, as one of my favorite rappers bbymutha says, "my own shooter." I quickly sobered up to the realization that no one would come to save me if I didn't make that attempt myself. While there have been moments where people in my life showed up for me, it has become more salient in adulthood that much of my journey, as Pecola's, would be informed by scars acquired in childhood. As bell hooks, a departed Black feminist writer and educator, writes in the book Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem, "Many Black children, like other children in our society, are emotionally neglected because there is no one who attends to their emotional needs."
The emotional neglect of children, of Black children, is therefore, normalized. Black villainy is rarely successfully addressed, but rather, mutable and complex. I would love to see the actualization of more ideologies and childrearing practices rooted in care, growth, guardianship, and empowerment. The Bluest Eye is a story of heartache, Black communal villainy, and the individual struggle for worthiness. Both Black children and adults should have uninterrupted access to stories like it, even if it's just to be able to see ourselves—and our stories—more clearly.
"Then Pecola asked a question that had never entered my mind. 'How do you do that? I mean, how do you get somebody to love you?' But Frieda was asleep. And I didn't know."
Kahlia Phillips (she/her) is a writer, axe-throwing coach, and independent researcher with a podcast, titled The Black Sex Ed Project Presents: Sexploratory Studies, which does deep dives into Black sexuality topics. She uses history and memory as a guide for building contemporary and future alternatives for an affirming, safe, consensual, and pleasurable Black sexual culture. As a Black, queer, Southern-born, working-class woman, she honors the stories and experiences of those who operate on the fringes of “respectable” society and who are always in pursuit of Black liberation, healing, protection, transformation, and joy. You can follow Kahlia on Twitter and follow the podcast on Spotify and Instagram.
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