Beauty has been held in the highest of regards since the beginning of time. From beauty pageants, red carpets, magazines, modeling, and pornography- women have been objectified and used as a standard or benchmark for society. In today’s urban society, the word “lightskinned” has taken up a different connotation. “Being lightskinned” or “acting lightskinned” can both be made into a negative meaning and disrespectful in conversation. Especially with the youth in our generation, beauty has been presented and molded into a ideology of a lighter skin tone leading to a more attractive or beautiful woman, but she experiences racism from her peers and from outside her racial group. In the case of The Bluest Eye, the dynamic characters all experience…show more content… A lightskinned man are seen as effeminate, mainly presented in social media as pretty boys, girly, and oversensitive. For example, Drake is constantly criticized and belittled for his appearance although he is one of the top artists in the world. His work, especially the content he puts out, is questioned by the demeanor he naturally has as a person which some describe and try to relate to as "feminine" whereas he portrays himself to be more arrogant, careless, and lawless in his music. When Pecola realizes that "if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights—if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different" (57), it shows how she degrades herself due to the trauma she has just endured watching a violent fight between her parents. From this, we can tell that Pecola believes that the color of your skin and eyes has a big influence on how a person is treated and how gruesome their livelihood…show more content… An interesting thing about the novel is that a character has two different perspectives when they are the storyteller. In the case of Claudia, we are able to see her thoughts as a child and as an adult looking back, which is very unique. Just like Pecola, Claudia went through racial standards in the form of beauty. However, Claudia has a different lifestyle with a big difference coming in the loving and stable family she is a part of. Claudia also has higher self-esteem than Pecola because Claudia is less submissive and more aggressive. She is also more proactive and has a better grasp of how society will treat her. When Claudia comes to the conclusion "The birdlike gestures are worn away to a mere picking and plucking her way between the tire rims and the sunflowers, between Coke bottles and milkweed, among all the waste and beauty of the world—which is what she herself was. All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us" (205), she makes the connection of how the community has taken a negative reaction to Pecola's pregnancy by comparing it to a "wasteland" with the "blackness and ugliness" of the community undeserving bestowed to Pecola. On the other hand, Claudia realizes that the community is blind to the true beauty of humanity instead of the corrupted
