In both The Bluest Eye and The American Born Chinese cultural identity is the main themes. Pecola and Jin are both trying to find themselves along with take pride in their race. Pecola sees herself as ugly and just wants to wake up one morning with blue eyes and white skin because to her, white is beautiful. Pecola is made fun of by her peers and looked at differently, just like Jin. Jin even went as far as altering his appearance to look more like Greg so Amelia will like him. Both of these characters wish they were something that their not and do not see their own individual beauty.

Unit 2

In class we were assigned to watch two videos, A Class Divided and Mirrors of Privilege. Both of these videos related to the novels and text assigned in Unit 2. The videos mainly dealt with racism along with white privilege and this also is the main issue in the book The Bluest Eye. This novel provides us with the issue of whites being superior to blacks, and this is shown in many different ways. Pecola often wishes for blue eyes and to look like the other girls, the “white girls”. She feels like the only way to be considered beautiful is to be white. In A Class Divided, the third grade teacher taught her young elementary students about segregation in a very interesting and different way. This teacher separated her students by blue eyes and brown eyes, and had one of the groups superior over the other. In my eyes, this really gave the kids at a young age the true understanding of racism in the world.