The Circle of Oppression:
Undeniable Mental Terrorism
In the articles �The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch� and �Rethinking Women�s Biology� and in the novel, The Bluest Eye, a strong prevailing theme is that of a white culture dehumanizing blacks. In order to understand these prevalent themes it is important to understand the meaning of the word dehumanization and to understand why people have practiced this way of thinking over and over again. According to the American Heritage Dictionary there are two meanings for the word dehumanization. The first is, �to deprive of human qualities such as individuality, compassion, or civility.� The second is �to render mechanical and routine.� After realizing the meaning of the word dehumanization the next step to understand this theme is to realize why certain groups of people throughout history have practiced such a way of thinking. The purpose of dehumanization is to dehumanize any group of people, in order to make killing them, torturing them, or harming them in some other way seem acceptable.
Through the years, dehumanization on a large scale has occurred over and over again. In Germany, Jewish people were labeled in terms which dehumanized them in order to make killing them seem acceptable. In America, black people were labeled in terms which dehumanized them in order to make enslaving them seem acceptable. And in present day and the recent past people are still dehumanizing blacks just to keep them oppressed. When people treat other people like animals, they have to convince themselves that they have the right to do this. By assigning animal like qualities to a group of people, the ignorant can somehow find justice in their actions. In short, dehumanization is the nauseating action taken by people who are for too ignorant to take responsibility for their own cruelty and hatred of people they fear.
Throughout the aforementioned novel and articles, dehumanization takes many shapes and forms. The main focus of this paper is to discuss and analyze the mistreatment of blacks in America and to compare the articles with the novel, The Bluest Eye, with regards to severe racial injustice and its debilitating consequences. These racial injustices are seen throughout Richard Wright�s �The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch.� This article is a true eye opener. For a person who had been unaware of the �Jim Crow South� this article shows a raw portrayal of the atrocities committed against blacks throughout the early twentieth century and beyond.
Wright sets up his story on a personal level. He treats the reader like a friend, revealing painful details of memories and using a conversational language. As seen is his opening statement, �My first lesson in how to live like a Negro came when I was quite small� (Wright 21). He goes on to talk about the trials he faced as a young black boy growing up in Arkansas. His first lesson comes after a �war� with the local white boys. He gets caught by a broken milk bottle behind the ear and ends up needing stitches to mend the wound. This incident makes him realize that he and his black friends are at a disadvantage because they can only throw cinders during the war. This first lesson conveys the idea of the cruelty of children and the white advantage, both strong prevailing themes throughout this article and The Bluest Eye.
The next lesson that Wright talks about, takes place as he is going out into the white world to find a job. He lands an opportunity with an optical company in Jackson, Mississippi. Wright describes the day of his interview. �I was very careful to pronounce my sirs distinctly in order that he might know that I was polite, that I knew where I was, and that I knew he was a white man. I wanted that job badly. He looked me over as though he were examining a prize poodle� (Wright 22). This excerpt is a staunch reminder of the dehumanization of blacks. It is seen again and again throughout history and through to modern day.
In �Rethinking Women�s Biology� another example of the animalistic treatment of blacks is revealed. The article explains the racial and class based prejudices which occurred in the nineteenth century. As women attempted to enroll in universities, men came up with one excuse after the next as to why it would not be allowed. The first theory was that women�s brains were simply too small to be educated. After that theory was disproved, women were told that they could not devote their time to studies because that would take away from their ability to procreate. Supposedly if they diverted their energies to studies, their ovaries and womb would shrivel, they would become sterile, and the human race would die out.
This theory, however, benefited only the upper-class women because meanwhile the working-class, poor, and black women were working endlessly for long hours in factories in unremitting conditions and in the houses of the upper-class peoples. This diverting from the devotion of the ovaries should have resulted in sterility for these women, but of course, it did not. �If anything, these women were said to breed too much. In fact their ability to have children despite the fact that they worked so hard was taken as evidence that they were less highly evolved than upper-class women; for them breeding was �natural,� as for animals� (Hubbard 46).
Black women were not only treated as animals in the medical world, but were treated as animals by white people at all times. In The Bluest Eye, Pauline Breedlove works in the house of a white family. She tends to the house, cleans, cooks, takes care of the little girl and does whatever else needs to be done. She is very emotionless towards her own daughter, Pecola. In fact, Pecola has to call her mother Mrs. Breedlove, she can not even use a term of endearment such as mother or mommy when addressing her. This notion seems unfair, but as the story continues Morrison reveals an even sadder one. One day Pecola, Claudia and Frieda are at the white family�s house where Pauline Breedlove works and they encounter the little white girl.
�Her hair was corn yellow and bound in a think ribbon. When she saw us, fear danced across her face for a second. She looked anxiously around the kitchen. �Where�s Polly?� she asked. The familiar violence rose in me. Her calling Mrs. Breedlove Polly, when even Pecola called her mother Mrs. Breedlove.� (Morrison 108). It is obvious that Pauline is like a pet to this little white girl. Pecola can not call her own mother by any other name than Mrs. Breedlove, while this little white girl not only calls her by her first name, Pauline, but has actually shortened the name to Polly. The reason why the little girl can do that is because she is white and Pauline Breedlove is black. Pauline Breedlove is nothing more to that little girl than a servant and a pet. She can call her what she likes to and can request her to do what she likes because Pauline Breedlove, �Polly,� is merely a work dog in that house.
The Bluest Eye was more than disheartening to me. I cried for two hours after I read the book. I picked it up before I went to sleep one night, with the intent of reading a few chapters and then putting it down, but that did not happen. I could not put the book down and I ended up reading it all in one night and getting hardly any sleep at all. I was struck by the content, by the lyricism of Toni Morrison�s words, by the devastation that the characters faced, and by every other tragic, yet amazing, aspect of this novel.
I think that a lot of people took this book only for its face value. Maybe not looking into the facts behind it. If a reader does not know anything about Toni Morrison than it could be easy for them to write this work off as a flit of fiction. But the reality is that the credibility of Toni Morrison's knowledge on the hardships endured by a black girl growing up in the 1940's is abounding. Toni Morrison is black and did grow up in the 1940's.
These facts are what led me to be so emotionally hurt and disturbed by this novel. I felt, while reading it, that this was a true story because I know that these things happened to real people. This is a work of fiction, but the articles, �The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch� and �Rethinking Women�s Biology� are not fiction. Those articles are true stories and while reading this novel I had them in the back of my mind along with Toni Morrison�s credibility, so that every word of the novel came alive in my mind�s eye and I could picture the novel�s tragedy unfolding before me.
Chapters were not used in The Bluest Eye. The novel is instead broken up into seasons�Fall, Winter, Spring, and Summer. By organizing the novel this way, Morrison creates the picture of a circle. This suggests that the events of this novel have happened many times before and will happen again. In the articles, �The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch� and �Rethinking Women�s Biology� oppression is oozing at the edges, an indication that no matter who a black person may be on an individual basis, they will always be reduced to the nothingness that being less than human can cast upon them. White people have perpetrated mental and physical terrorism on blacks throughout history because they allow themselves to dehumanize the entire race.
Reading this novel was eye-opening for me as a woman and as a white person. The Bluest Eye revealed things to me that I never wanted to know, but I realize now that they were things I needed to know.