The Other as a Key to the Self

Something I found fascinating with The Bluest Eye and Cheng’s arguments is the way that race and the conception of one’s own race can be reinforced or complicated by the view of the other and the view of the other as a spectator of the self. The doll tests that Cheng describes illustrate society’s pressure for a child to choose which race to “play with” and that a realization, oftentimes a forced one, of one’s own ethnicity is enough to make one grieve over the lack of Whiteness. This image of Black rejection contrasts to the one Morrison paints when Claudia rejects the White doll, even though she “knew that the doll represented what they thought was…[her] fondest wish” (p. 20,) which, along with her contempt for Shirley Temple’s dancing with Bojangles, who “ought to have been soft-shoeing it and chuckling with” her (p. 19) illustrates how children “displayed an awareness of racial difference…[and] have processed the symbolic values of that difference” (Cheng p. ix) through identification and mis-identification with the other (Whiteness) in relation to the self. While the Black/White binary may be the one that is most often studied, I am left with questions regarding those of mixed race who have two others (the White and the Black) as exemplified by Sarah Jane in The Imitation of Life who, like the children in the doll studies, didn’t want to identify with her Black doll, while at the same time, probably wouldn’t have held contempt for Bojangles. Society’s need for Sarah Jane and Black children to choose Black dolls illustrates not a problem with the children, but a problem with society’s unease at having someone pass in and out of boxes. When everything is categorized, life is much easier; however, how can a premature choice of race, or even the question of choosing only one race, stifle and/or harm a child’s development since a Black child’s mis-recognizing the Black other as an other may, and in fact has, lead children into accepting their eventual Black fate while still holding the Black “other” inside of them in contempt.