Analysis #6 - Ethnicity Studies and Post-Colonial Theory

Analysis #6 – Ethnicity Studies and Post-Colonial Theory

Langston Hughes, the preeminent writer during the Harlem Renaissance, posits in his work “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” that black peoples are constantly criticized by both whites and blacks for their “blackness” and being inferior to their white, “superior” counterparts. Hughes argues that blacks subconsciously want to be white, inferring to how a statement by a young black poet who said “I want to be a poet – not a Negro poet” is an inadvertent way of saying “I want to be white” (Leitch 1192).
The 1970 novel The Bluest Eye, written by Toni Morrison, reflects this notion Hughes presented of the desire for blacks to want to want to be white. The protagonist of the novel, a young black girl, dreams of having “big beautiful eyes” (Morrison 20). As the narrator writes: “if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different… [so] each night, without fail, she prayed for pretty blue eyes” (Morrison 46). This quote from the novel, in which it is implied that having “blue eyes” and thus being white is “beautiful” reflects a recurring motif in which whiteness is beauty and thus desired. This underscores Hughes’ notion of the “urge within the race toward whiteness” and towards the desire “to be as little Negro and as much American as possible” (Leitch 1192). This desire to be white and not black is, as Hughes writes, a subconscious desire, in which it is believed by blacks that “white is best” (Leitch 1195). This is not hard to understand, since white culture has been the dominant culture in America and has been connected with holding the virtues, beauty, and morals of society (Leitch 1193). Reflected in The Bluest Eye, the narrator writes: “The master had said, “ ‘ You are ugly people.’ They had looked about themselves and saw nothing to contradict the statement” (Morrison 39). This quotes suggests that both the “white” master and the blacks alike believe “they are ugly”, that is “inferior” to the “beauty of whiteness”.
Hughes concludes in his work that he would like for “younger Negro artists” to be able to express themselves, with their dark-skins, without shame, believing that “no great poet has even been afraid of being himself” (Leitch 1192-1996). Hughes, who wrote his work in 1926 during the Harlem Renaissance, believes that a great poet should be able to work against the criticism they get from both their “own group” and from whites. Toni Morrison, a post-modern writer, embodies this notion of writing derived from the life she knows and staying true to herself. Ultimately, the novel The Bluest Eye exemplifies a black poet (writer) who shows that there is no shame in being black. As illuminated in Morrison’s novel, the protagonist eventually gets blue eyes, but at the cost of her sanity. This reflects on the earlier text in the novel in which with blue eyes, the protagonist could be “different”. But in this case, in which with blue eyes she is deemed insane, being different is a perverse ironic suggestion that being different is not normal and being true to self, as Hughes suggests, is a true representation of a “great poet”.

Works Cited

Leitch, Vincent B, ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New
York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2010.

Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. Plume: Middlesex, England. 1970.