“Here was an ugly little girl asking for beauty… A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes.“ The Bluest Eye.

In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison tells the story of Pecola, an African-American girl who blames her dark skin color and African features for being mocked and ridiculed by her classmates. Hoping to feel accepted instead, Pecola prays God to give her blue eyes.

Morrison’s novel isn’t a mere fictional portrayal. At the origins of the character of Pecola is the author’s encounter with an African-American classmate who admitted asking God to gift her with the eyes of a “white girl.”[1]

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11337.The_Bluest_Eye

Morrison’s little friend’s confession reflects more than a superficial longing for beauty. It can reflect the desire of a portion of African-Americans, -or black people living in a predominantly white society-, to erase attributes associated with ‘blackness’ and assimilate themselves with what is taken to be the dominant category.

A large portion of people having such a desire comprises people whose vision of the world and the self was informed by depictions distinguishing between people’s human values on the basis of their race, favoring white Americans.

http://dubois-doubleconsciousness.blogspot.com/2014/04/double-consciousness.html

What Pecola’s story reveals is that this desire can take extreme forms and have damaging consequences on a person’s psyche and sense of self. A poignant illustration of it is the manifestation of a type of double-consciousness in African-American psyche during the Jim Crow period.

In his collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), African-American sociologist, activist and author, W.E.B Dubois, digs deeper in the specific feelings, experiences, and roots at the origins of this phenomenon.

Portrait of W.E.B Dubois

In his essay “Souls of Black Folk,” Dubois contends that a portion of African-Americans living under the Jim Crow laws suffer from a psychological phenomenon referred to as double-consciousness. He defines it as a “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, (…) in a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.“(17) He argues that Black Americans’ experience of the self is fragmented into two “unreconciled” senses of identity: that of being American, and that of being African. At the origins of such an experience is the process of splitting of one’s sense of identity into two identities, perceived as distinct and antagonist to one another.

“Double Consciousness” (https://hacejarilo.janettravellmd.com/)

In his essay “On Being Ashamed Of Oneself” (1933), Dubois explains that such a phenomenon results out of a process of internalization of negative stereotypes and attributes associated with one’s racial group at an early stage of life. Such stereotypes are rooted in specific power dynamics initiated by white Americans under the Jim Crow laws establishing the racial inferiority of African-Americans. During that period, white Americans associated black Americans with : “poverty, ignorance, suppressed and disadvantaged people, dirty and with bad manners, uncultured, etc.“

As a result, a portion of black Americans internalized the ‘white gaze‘ and developed a second self, distinct from the ‘African’ one, to be accepted into mainstream America and survive as a minority.

“Face Reality”, Laurie Cooper

Having a second ‘acceptable’ self led some of them to abandon the specificities of their cultural heritage, adopt an anti-racial patriotic attitude, and, in some cases, lighten their skin color to assimilate with white Americans.

Having established that the African-American experience of double-consciousness, result of the internalization of the ‘white gaze’, can lead one to desire to erase their ‘African self’, we can wonder whether an emancipation from such deeply ingrained feelings is possible.

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/05/20125111291883222.html

Our contention is that black people’s presence as agents in these power dynamics itself presupposes the possibility for them to emancipate from them.

In Subject and Power, French sociologist, Michel Foucault, argues for the possibility for alienated agents to transcend oppressing power relations.

Portrait of Michel Foucault

He proposes a redefinition of the concept of power, affirming that the very fact of being an agent in these relationships presupposes the possibility of emancipating from them.

He begins by arguing that power only exists through the exercise of it, in the context of power relations existing between two,-or more-, agents. He later distinguishes between relation of power and relation of violence. While the latter is as an act “upon a body or upon things (…) which it forces, bends, breaks, destroys“ (340), a power relation is one in which the act of a subject is directed to act upon another’s action.

For Foucault, it presupposes two things: that the one whom power is exercised on is “recognized, and maintained to the end as a subject who acts,“ and that he is able to react and operate on “a whole field of responses, reactions, results“. That entails that the agent has to be free in order for him to be involved in a relation of power.

The sociologist concludes that power presupposes a form of freedom and agency.

https://quotefancy.com/michel-foucault-quotes

Thus, Foucault’s redefinition of power allows us to read one’s experience of double-consciousness as leaving room for their emancipation from it.

In his historical inquiry on the self, Foucault attempts to prove that an agent’s understanding of himself is the product of purely contingent historical configurations and developments. What an oppressed agent can interpret as objective proofs for their ‘inferior’ position is but a set of subjective, contingent, and escapable beliefs mistakenly taken for true.

Yet, undergoing such a project of emancipation requires from the agent to question every belief that informed their vision of the self, in order to establish what counts as justified true belief, and what doesn’t.

Undertaking such a historical work is the only way for an oppressed agent to reach a field of mobility from pathos to freedom.

Bibliography:

[1] Interview with Toni Morrison, “On the inspiration for The Bluest Eye“ published on 1 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02x9ybx , 2015.

Morrison, Toni, The Bluest Eye, New York : Plume Book, 1994.

Dubois, W.E.B, The Souls of Black Folk, Essays and Sketches, Chicago, A. G. McClurg, 1903.

Foucault, Michel, “Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8, №4, pp. 777–795, The University of Chicago Press, 1982.