Internalized Racism

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To continue, this unequal difference between the personalities of the individual is the result of the internalization of racial discourses. Since people of colour are victimized in racist terms, they end up acting in ways that support racism. According to Bivens, these discourses do not deal only with stereotypes and scapegoating; since they also are a system of oppression based on race where power is distributed unequally between white people and people of colour due to white skin privileges. This unbalanced distribution of power affects several levels of the lives of coloured people. Firstly, it leaves them without power to make and enforce decisions; as a consequence, they rely on white people, considering them superior because of their…show more content…
As it is a system of oppression, it overwhelms the victims in every possible way. For example, despite the Breedloves migrated up North in order to find better job opportunities, they are poor: “their poverty was traditional and stultifying, it was not unique” (TBE 36). Added to that, Cormier-Hamilton remarks that the economy and power are linked to skin colour, particularly, to light skin, this is, to the idea of beauty: “a black individual’s chances of achieving both social and economic advantages is in direct correlation to his/her ability to correspond more closely to the images of beauty and common ideologies of the dominant society” (Cormier-Hamilton…show more content…
By accepting her identity, she has a voice; and for that she is the narrative void at the beginning. Claudia’s reaction to the stereotype on beauty is very different from Pecola’s: she hates it. In fact, she is not interested in the materiality of the body but in the spirituality. It is reflected when, for Christmas, she only wanted to stay with her family, she did not need a material present. As she says: “I did not want to have anything to own, or to possess any object. I wanted rather to feel something on Christmas day” (TBE 20). However, she was gifted a the loving gift of a “big, blue-eyed Baby Doll” (TBE 18). Contrarily to most of children who would immediately play motherhood games with the doll, Claudia only thinks of analyse it, dismember it, in order to find what was the thing that made the doll lovable for everybody. I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability, that had escaped me, but apparently only me. Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window sings—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured. (TBE

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