The House that Race Built

The year 1970 was spiteful. It was a year of the United States’ continued reckoning with its racist past, present (and future); its sexism and misogyny; its homophobia; its class wars; its jingoism and imperialism. It was the year that Angela Davis was fired from UCLA for being a communist; it was the year that race riots occurred in Augusta, GA, Miami and Daytona Beach, FL; it was the year that Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton was released from jail. And the list goes on. The country needed a salve for the wound inflicted by white supremacy, though no amount of ointment would scab over centuries of the deeds of white men.

As they always already had done, black women came to the rescue with their own form of root work on this more “imperfect” union. The sweat and toil of their labor in the fields and in white folks’ houses that would spill into the streets and on picket lines, was the historical context for what emerged as a black feminist consciousness made manifest materially and rhetorically. In the preface to her 1970 black feminist anthology, The Black Woman, for example, writer Toni Cade Bambara proclaims, “We are involved in a struggle for liberation: liberation from the exploitive and dehumanizing system of racism, from the manipulative control of a corporate society; liberation from the constrictive norms of ‘mainstream’ culture, from the synthetic myths that encourage us to fashion ourselves rashly from without (reaction) rather than from within (creation)” (1970, 7). And as if singing a harmonic alto to Bambara’s soprano, the twin namesake Toni Morrison punctuates Bambara’s declaration with an exclamation mark: The Bluest Eye.

Indeed, the story of Pecola Breedlove in The Bluest Eye is exemplary of what happens when we fail to loosen the hold of the “synthetic myths” that are often internalized as a reaction to white supremacy: when we are seduced by the seeming “innocence” of language that formulates the “Dick and Jane” children’s book primer that opens the novel; when we, like Cholly Breedlove, buy the lie of what manhood should be and feels like, and get trapped in the pursuit of an ideal that leaves one forever wanting and ultimately, “a ratty nigger” (Morrison 2000, 17); when we, like Pauline Breed-love, become maimed by our obsession with an external “other” rather than the other within, which keeps us from living our best life; indeed, when we, like all our ancestors and the yet unborn yield to the temptation of racism it keeps us “distracted,” as Morrison, speaking in a different context, notes, from doing our work because “there will always be one more thing” (1975). Ultimately, like the entire Breedlove family, we sometimes drape around us a stunningly beautiful yet deceptively cheap cloak of ugly that does not belong to us—“a cloak of ugliness” we have accepted to wear without question (2000, 39).

Given this “ugly” historical context, fifty years is an eye blink— or a mother’s side eye. We have been stuck in the changing same for over three centuries, and so it is the themes of Morrison’s first novel that call us to reckon with what it all means—this so-called black American life in which the election of a black president lulled us into a quietude that actually awoke a sleeping giant. And now we know that orange is definitely not the new black and there were no marigolds in the fall of 2016. Fifty years. The reckoning continues and the ante has been upped.

How apropos, then, that we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of one of the greatest novels in the history of American arts and letters. Pecola’s tragic story is a necessary precautionary tale that has stood the test of the half century of its existence. It has done so not only because racism and our internalization of it persists, but also because Morrison provides us a language—a primer—to put a name to that process of internalization. But putting a name to it was only the first step. It actually may...