Racial Trauma and Microaggression in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

Abstract

Racial trauma is associated with the detrimental psychological impact of race-based discrimination having symptoms like those of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). With accounts of systemic racism across the globe, it is quite pertinent to discuss the distressing impact of living within a society of structural racism. Racial trauma involves exposure and re-exposure to race-based stress, which can be of different forms, microaggression being one of them. Microaggression shows how instances at a micro-level like insults and slights against black people, can have a detrimental effect on the mental health of those who experience it. The Bluest Eye (1970), the debut novel of Nobel prize-winning author Toni Morrison, is a tragic story of Pecola Breedlove, an African- American girl, longing for the socially constructed idea of beauty. A study of her character will highlight the effects of internalised racism based on the tragic events of discrimination and marginalisation in Pecola’s life and her psychological response to it. This paper will focus on racial trauma and Chester E. Pierce’s concept of microaggression to foreground the psychological distress that Pecola is grappling with, in the narrative and how apart from acts of violence, offensive and derogatory statements against the people of colour damages their psyche