The Importance Of Abuse In The Bluest Eye By Toni Morrison

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As children, our parents are parents are everything to us. Our world revolves around them and we need them for everything. We depend on them as we grow. Not only for physical things like food and clothing, but we unknowingly depend on them to provide affection and love as well, which in turn creates the skeleton of our emotional being. The Bluest Eye centers on Pecola Breedlove, a young African American girl that wants more than anything to have blue eyes. Sure, she’d like to have lighter skin, maybe a little less nappy hair, but more than anything she wants blue eyes. Not just plain ol’ blue. The bluest possible. She believes if she has blue eyes she will be worthy of love, and she will find happiness. At eleven years old, Pecola already believes …show more content…
They all develop a negative internal feeling that they continue to carry with them for the rest of their lives. They learn to improperly function in the chaos of abuse, and the negative feelings they carry inhibit them from creating or sustaining healthy future relationships. The characters are unable to process their emotions in a healthy way and the majority of the time their first reaction is to proceed with violence. Sammy Breedlove urges his mom to kill his own father when he sees them fighting in front of him. (p. 44) If a child grows up being shown that their own family is invaluable, unworthy of respect and love, how can we expect them to treat outsiders? Their consideration of others decreases, and eventually the significance of a human being’s life will go down with it. In 2008, the homicide offending rate for blacks was 7 times higher than the rate for whites, and most of these crimes are black on black. (Cooper, 2011) These types of statistics leads to whole communities that are dysfunctional, creating more crime, which leads to more men and women in jail for those crimes, and more children left with an unhealthy home

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