The Bluest Eye

This was my second time reading The Bluest Eye, and I definitely got a lot more out of it this time through. It's a difficult book with a complicated structure. It's all about how envy and jealousy can turn into hatred and self-hatred. It's about generational trauma and how it propagates. It's about innocence and the loss of innocence and what happens when the people who are supposed to love you don't. Or when that love gets twisted.

It's a really important book, and I'm glad that I read it with my book club because the conversation that followed gave me a lot of hope.

When I started my neighborhood book club, we began with Tayari Jones' An American Marriage. It's about a black man who's been imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit. But roughly half the club was sure that he'd committed the crime. There's this naive trust in our justice system that privileged white people grow up with, and it's hard to start to question that. Black Lives Matter came up at that meeting (or one soon thereafter) and a lot of them women disagreed with the movement and the message.

Fast forward three years, and the conversation was different. This time around everyone took Morrison's story at face value. They'd read other black authors in the meantime, and they were starting to see patterns emerge. And those patterns were driving home that these injustices, far from being invented, were common. It reminded me of Adichie's "danger of a single story", though coming from the other direction. She argues that we should read widely because a single story can never be representative of everyone. But you should also read widely because a single story can be so easy to dismiss.

I still feel radical when compared to my neighbors (which is interesting, because I always feel moderate in the company of radicals), but I no longer feel like there's an impassable gap between us. Change is slow, but discussing this book with my neighbors I could see evidence of that change happening. And I felt instrumental to it, like I had actually managed to make a difference, however small.

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