The children inherit the patterns and problems from their parents so the vicious circle continues, the self-hatred pass down generation after generation, for example Pecola inherited her mother's obsession with beauty, back in the day her mother tried to look like the Hollywood stars, she even try to do her hair like Jean Harlow and now Pecola wants the blue eyes liker her idol Shirley Temple. This happens because as I said at the beginning they grow up in a society that doesn't find them beautiful or even worth to be looked at and as a consequence of this they internalizes their ugliness and this has devastating consequences for them:
You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source.…show more content… In the novel there are two kinds of racism, one is the racism black people suffer from white people who regard them as inferior because of their skin color and "colorism" which is racism between people of color. One of the finest example of racism in the novel is the candy store scene, Pecola goes to Mr.Yacobowski store, he is a blue-eyed immigrant and despite of also belonging to a different culture and therefore being familiar with being the "other", from the moment Pecola steeps into the store we can sense some feeling of rejection towards her as he doesn't even, "waste the effort of a glance" because for him, "there is nothing to see" (39). So Pecola is invisible for Mr.Yacobowski and her invisibility is caused by the color of her skin. As Pecola herself acknowledges the "distaste" must be for her "blackness". It is as if Pecola's skin color served her as a cloak of social invisibility because other people can see beyond her skin color. This reminds me of Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man which is the story of a black man who realizes that people only see the color of his skin so he feels invisible, the same happens with Pecola and Mr.Yacobowski he can only see the color of her skin therefore she is invisible for…show more content… She had explained to him the difference between colored people and niggers. They were easily identifiable. Colored people were neat and quiet; niggers were dirty and loud" (70). Geraldine refuses to being called black and makes a clear distinction between being black and being colored, but not only that she also uses black as an insult: "You nasty little black bitch. Get out of my house" (76). So we have a half black woman, using black as an insult. This is one of the devastating consequences I talked about before, she has interiorize that being black is bad to a point that she rejects her own "blackness". The reason why the black characters in the novel despise their blackness so much is because whiteness is associated with virtue, cleanliness and value while being black is associated with immorality, dirtiness and worthlessness. This goes to such and extend that the black characters in the novel use markers such us the shade or skin, the hue of their eyes or the texture of their hair to define their whiteness. They sort of measure their whiteness in an attempt to conform to the white beauty standards that will make them loved and accepted by the rest of the