Beauty in the Eye of a Child

What I particularly appreciate about The Bluest Eye , is that it offers a child's perspective. This is helpful and almost necessary in confronting the issues of race and beauty that are proposed in this novel. Specifically, I'd like to key in on Claudia's hatred for her dolls, and how she would tear them apart. Her hatred for the dolls depends on the way people treasure and value white baby dolls, which she also seems to be aware of the similar reactions that people give white girls. Its interesting because children are severely observant; and I say severely because when they recognize something as a problem or even take interest in something, they are so persistent in knowing more about it, or questioning it until they feel that they are satisfied by whomever responds to there inquiries. Claudia seems to have although, put together her own reasoning behind the lust over white baby dolls, from listening to how her own mother rants about how valuable these dolls are, and then being aware of how people react to them. This part of the novel really constructs whiteness as a normalizing and standardized beauty. This is something which has been essentially embedded in our culture that is seemingly hard to get rid of or rather change. I think this discussion about Claudia's hatred of white dolls challenges us to think about where these ideas of beauty and whiteness come from, and maybe even how they are constantly reinforced by things that we overlook or don't exactly pay attention to everyday.

I'd like to push this idea outside of just beauty ,and just think about other ways that whiteness has been seen as the normal, or standard in our culture. Thinking about it in this broad sense suffices the construction of white beauty all together. For instance, I'm thinking about the portrayal of family life; and how there are so many television shows that have normal and stable white families. On the Disney channel, there are a ton of these. For an example, Good luck Charlie or Wizards f Waverley Place(granted they are a family with magical powers...) these are just two general representations of what a family should look like; and there are many other networks that show this as well, but I use the Disney channel for an example because it has a great deal of children as their audience. This is not to say that there are no television shows that idealize family life amongst a more diverse or non-white group of people, but this is just to say that there are many and more popular shows which demonstrate stable white families. I mention this idea of the normal family because it encourages such notions of seeing whiteness as beauty. As we continue to read on in this novel, it will be interesting to see how these ideas of beauty expand on larger issues of race and how perhaps the normalization of beauty in that sense, takes on many different forms of race issues that we can even apply to our contemporary settings.