Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

Scientists tell us that 3/4 of the world's population has brown eyes. About 9 percent, blue, and the rest of the colors -- hazel, amber, grey, green etc. -- are distributed in lesser and lesser proportions around the globe.

But fictional heroes and heroic figures in Western literature and visual media almost always have blue eyes. Even common emjois have blue eyes. Seems improbable considering the data, but there it is.

This is changing with the darkening of popular culture, but blue, especially among females, is still the preference.

In her book The Bluest Eye (1970), Toni Morrison distilled predominant beauty standards down to the color in the title. The main character, the young Black girl, Pecola, is driven mad by the oppressive and arbitrary assignment of desirability and value in her community of Lorain, Ohio, which, of course, is a simulacrum of American culture.

Morrison's book has been removed from school libraries all over because of its uncompromising depiction of human destructiveness, not just racism and colorism, but physical, emotional and sexual abuses. She even explores pernicious religious fraudulence as it preys upon Pecola's gullibility, promising miraculous physical transformations for a price.

Morrison, whose brilliance as a storyteller was celebrated with multiple awards, including the Nobel Prize, was never as gauche as to turn the elegant prose in her novels into polemical screeds. Her work is much too elegant and refined for such base amateurism.

Rather, she excoriated systemic racism and cultural bias, sexual hypocrisy and misogyny and fraudulence in stories that were never told conventionally but inventively, surprisingly and searingly.

Attacks on her vision might appear, through some folks' eyes, as unimportant in light of other pressing concerns. But I think it is part of the overall scheme to delegitimize anything -- no matter how exquisitely crafted -- that might awaken our consciousness, remove the scales from our eyes, as it were, and help us see what is being done, and ask "why?"