Racism is an issue that has plagued the American community since the dawn of its time. America is centered around racism and it has been used to build the structure of America. Capitalism needs a sacrifice to function. The sacrifice being the working class, the closest to free labor other than slavery. The ones who work for the rich. America has created a system using racism to exploit African-Americans and other minorities to be that sacrifice. This has left black communities trapped in a cycle that is very difficult to escape from. Institutional racism traps blacks into ghettos with poor schools, lack of access to healthy food, poor housing and proper medical care. The novel “Sula”, written by Toni Morrison, illustrates these effects of
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“Nel was the color of wet sandpaper -- just enough to skip the blows of the pitch black true bloods and the contempt of old women who worried about things as bad blood mixtures and knew that the origins of the mule and the mulatto were one and the same” (Morrison 52). In the black community, there is such a thing as being too black or not black enough. Blacks internalize the racism we are exposed to. We are just as capable to discriminate ourselves as our oppressors do so to us. Morrison, gives us an example when Tar Baby arrives to “The Bottom”, a black community in the novel that was established through institutional racism. “When he first came…, the people called him pretty johnnie, but Eva looked at his milky skin and his cornsilk hair and out of a mixture of fun and meanness called him Tar Baby” (Morrison 40). Tar Baby’s whiteness automatically isolated him from the black community. He is a minority within a minority. To some, like Eva, he was too white. Hence the ironic name she placed upon him. Tar being the blackest you could get. Other’s correlated the whiteness of Tar Baby to beauty. This is an example of how the ideas behind racism infiltrated the black mind. It instilled a sense of self-hate within blacks, where white is beautiful and black is
“Nel was the color of wet sandpaper -- just enough to skip the blows of the pitch black true bloods and the contempt of old women who worried about things as bad blood mixtures and knew that the origins of the mule and the mulatto were one and the same” (Morrison 52). In the black community, there is such a thing as being too black or not black enough. Blacks internalize the racism we are exposed to. We are just as capable to discriminate ourselves as our oppressors do so to us. Morrison, gives us an example when Tar Baby arrives to “The Bottom”, a black community in the novel that was established through institutional racism. “When he first came…, the people called him pretty johnnie, but Eva looked at his milky skin and his cornsilk hair and out of a mixture of fun and meanness called him Tar Baby” (Morrison 40). Tar Baby’s whiteness automatically isolated him from the black community. He is a minority within a minority. To some, like Eva, he was too white. Hence the ironic name she placed upon him. Tar being the blackest you could get. Other’s correlated the whiteness of Tar Baby to beauty. This is an example of how the ideas behind racism infiltrated the black mind. It instilled a sense of self-hate within blacks, where white is beautiful and black is