The Bluest Eye And Marxism Race Creates Vulnerability

The Bluest Eye and Marxism: Race Creates Vulnerability Famous African American social reformer Frederick Douglass once said, â€Å"Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.† In other words, Douglass believed that a society that takes advantage of and devalues people of a certain class, including—considering Douglass was a civil rights activist—racial class, is perilous to the people living in that society because the oppressor will feel threatened by the oppressed and vice versa. With this in mind, it is relatively easy to relate the idea of class oppression to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye through Mr. Yacobowski, a minor character and low-class, white immigrant, a member of one of the lowest classes in 1940s America. During the time era, discrimination was often u sed against immigrants as a way to separate them from native citizens. Said immigrants tended to see this discrimination with contempt and, when people are treated as the lowest, those people will want to find evidence of some sort that they are indeed not so. In The Bluest Eye, Mr. Yacobowski expresses subdued hostility towards the book’s young protagonist to improve his self-esteem about his own social status. He exhibits his sense of separation from Pecola’s position through the use of race, communicating, through the lens