Segregation In Fences And The Bluest Eye By Toni Morrison

Segregation in America used to be the standard. Even in times where segregation was outlawed, racial tensions still existed between individual races, especially white and black populations. In the play Fences, the main character, Troy, is a previous baseball player for the Negor League. He believes that if he was white, his life would be completely different; also, he would be different if he had a better childhood. Similarly in The Bluest Eye, Cholly is a man who is a drunk and rapes his daughter; however, he had a severley traumatic childhood that shaped him to be susceptible to these actions. In both Fences and The Bluest Eye, Troy and Cholly’s complex characters represent the oppressive backhand of societal pressure that results in systemic

From the very beginning of his life, Cholly was neglected from his mother when she “placed him on a junk heap by the railroad” and he would’ve died if his aunt hadn’t rescued him, but “he wondered whether it would have been just as well to have died there” (Morrison 132-133). To have this extreme idea of being better off just because the place and skin color he was born in is something no young child should be thinking. There is an idea within The Bluest Eye of being outside, which means being kicked out of a home, neglected or poor and on the streets. To the narrator of the novel, being outside is the lowest of the low. The first time Cholly is put outside is by his mother when he is only a few days old; however, later in life Cholly is the one who neglects his family. As he was once forced into the outside world, he now “put his family outdoors” and “catapulted himself beyond the reaches of human consideration. He had joined the animals” (Morrison 18). By neglecting his family, he is doing the same thing that his mother did to him as a child. Even though no father should neglect his family, this idea of being on the streets is all Cholly has known throughout his life. His mother abandoned him on the street because she would have been a black single mother in a time where that was unacceptable, especially Cholly being a child of wedlock. The societal pressure that was on Cholly to be a good father figure, after he had only known being on the outside world, caused him to reverent back to his old ways by kicking his family out on the streets due to his