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A Study of Toni Morrison's Effort to Deconstruct the Sociological 高應科大人文社會科學學報 2009 年 12 月 ISSN 1815-0373 第六卷第二期 P231-258 A Study of Toni Morrison’s Effort to Deconstruct the Sociological Concepts of Ethnocentrism and the Assimilation Model in Her The Bluest Eye (1970) Lewis T. C. Lu Professor, Applied Foreign Languages Department National Kaohsiung University of Applied Sciences Abstract Ethnocentrism is a very important sociological concept that is formulated as a universal characteristic of autonomous societies or ethnic groups. According to this concept, in-group members always regard their values, goals, and interests as the center of everything, and the out-group members are rated and scaled with reference to them. As a result, in-group members are eager to look for grounds for the negative evaluation of the out-group. However, Toni Morrison, a female African-American writer who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, reveals in her first novel The Bluest Eyes (1970) that large numbers of black characters seem to feel ashamed of their skin color and constantly experience a denial of their racial identity and themes of blackness in the emulation of white standards in the larger society. Their readiness to acculturate, however, fails to facilitate their socio-economic assimilation; instead, it puts them on an increasingly unequal and servile footing with the majority whites. Morrison is also critical of the assimilation model in American sociology, dismissing its assumption as so unrealistic as to ignore the constant reinvention of ethnicity and its seething resistance to what Milton Gordon (1961) called “Anglo-conformity.” Obviously, Morrison’s purpose is to tantalize the structuralist notion underlying the dual or binary oppositions between black and white, bad and good, the marginalized and the “mainstream,”1 sordid reality and fairy tale of the white myth, as well as inferiority and superiority. However, in doing so she unwittingly “deconstructs” the －231－ 高應科大人文社會科學學報 ISSN 1815-0373 root notions of ethnocentrism and the assimilation model 2 that has been widely favored by sociologists since Robert Park. 3 Key word: Toni Morrison, ethnocentrism, assimilation, mass culture, group identity Introduction In his From Savage to Negro, Lee Baker contends that, if culture is historically specific, African-American folklore and cultural practices must maintain continuity from their West African traditions (168). In the eyes of the assimilationist sociology, the racialized minority, despite its skin-color difference, can also be culturally assimilated into “the host” society. As a predominant paradigm in the twentieth and thirties, Robert Park’s Chicago School of Sociology believed in a more flexible model of social transformation in the sense that biological hierarchy can be transformed into biological equality through the stages of competition, conflict, accommodation, and eventually, assimilation (Bulmer 59). Park indicated that the progressing non-cosmopolitan Negro cultures are pathological because they have deviated from the American cultural and behavioral criteria. Such pathology is fostered in response to racial discrimination, slavery heritages, and unwholesome environments (Baker 178). Nevertheless, it simply constitutes a barrier to assimilation that can be easily overcome through time. Such a vision of assimilation emphasizes the absence of long-standing and slow-to-change African traditions for black Americans among whom Geraldine and Pecola as characters in The Bluest Eye are praised for their new citizenship models (177). In fact, minority citizenship has been enshrined by the new official model of Brown v. Board of Education that toppled the segregationist logic to become the new paradigm of social science based on ethnicity and assimilation. Even the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), in its efforts to challenge segregation, accepted the concept of racial equality. Historically, fictional characters such as Geraldine and Pauline constitute the white norm of cultural citizenship in the 1940’s that was critiqued by Morrison’s novel. Many other brown girls in the novel also believe that they can assimilate themselves into white society by adopting the middle-class trappings, values, habits and possessions of the WASPs, even if their race undercuts, or fails to signal, such a cultural membership. On the contrary, Black Arts movement and Black Nationalism in the seventies when the novel was written never believed that such a cultural membership is a perfect solution to the Negro problem. As implicit in the name “nationalism,” Black nationalists suggest that American blacks should find a nation by separating America into two: one for whites and －232－ Lewis T.C.Lu A Study of Toni Morrison’s Effort to Deconstruct the Sociological Concepts of Ethnocentrism and the Assimilation Model in Her The Bluest Eye (1970) the other for blacks with nationhood of the latter defined and substantiated by the African-Americanism (Neal 30-38). Likewise, as the spiritual sister of Black Nationalism, Black Aesthetic argues for the de-Americanization of black communities in the belief that an alternative, separatist, and race-essentialist model should be employed to solve the problem of “double consciousness” on the part of American blacks and their different sense of national belonging (Gayle xxii).4 To rise against the unification model set by Brown v. Board of Education, black nationalists, separatists, and aestheticists argue for the reclamation of racial pride and the notion of “black is beautiful.” 5 On the other hand, Park’s discourse and portrayal of black pathology is reinforced by Myrdal who also sees Negroes as assimilable racialized minorities. 6 Since segregation is unconstitutional as suggested by the NAACP, social scientists on the premise of Brown tend to see cultural assimilation as the panacea for racial minorities. Under the pressures, integration seems to be the first answer for all social science behind Brown. However, Morrison questions such a premise in her Black Aesthetics novel, probing deep into the theme of beauty and ugliness in connection with race as well as cultural oppression (Dubey 33-34). Deeply engaged with African American psychology, Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is acknowledged by the Black Aesthetic concepts because its intertexual ground dramatizes the pathology in the heroine Pecola who is unable to see the beauty within herself. The formation of such pathology is complicated but comprehensible in that black readers can easily experience in their daily lives terrible yearnings, secret thoughts, and incomprehensible frustrations. According to Ruby Dee, Morrison simply helps black readers ferret up such gnawing feelings from their unadmitted sub-consciousness so that, after they have been disillusioned by the hope of assimilation, they can really breathe deeply and say out loud that “black is beautiful” (319). The rest of this paper will discuss further how Morrison rises against assimilation as a conceptual model. The Assimilation Model of American Sociology If minority groups must go through the stages of competition, conflict, and accommodation before they assimilate themselves into the dominant way of life in the larger society, then assimilation must be the last stage in the dynamic of racial interactions. Sociologists tend to measure the immigrant group along with each of these dimensions, treating them as the gateways to immigrant assimilation. It is widely believed by assimilation sociologists that American blacks will eventually accommodate and conform to the mores of the majority group by following the same path as that of the European immigrants (Jackson and Weidman 147). Robert Park and other Chicago School －233－ 高應科大人文社會科學學報 ISSN 1815-0373 sociologists in the 1920’s and 1930’s were concerned about the ethnic relations and the role they play in the approaches to the issues of urban sociology such as ethnic community, social reform, crime, poverty, juvenile delinquency, and the problems rising out of immigrant adaptation to the American mainstream. Since defined as the relinquishment of minority culture in favor of the dominant society, the ideas of assimilation and the melting pot are characterized, not by the meshing of values, lifestyles, and behavioral patterns, by the loss of ethnic identity and the adoption of language, practice, and forms of behavior and the culture of the dominant group. For the racial minorities, merging into the dominant culture is a uni-dimensional and one way process which is not only necessary and inevitable but also irreversible. Such an almost natural sequence of interactions eventually leads to absorption, modernization, and Americanization.7 In other words, the retention of ethnicity is regarded by many Chicago school sociologists as either “otherness” or “marginality” and only the dominant culture deserves its security and superiority (Buenker 86). According to Milton M. Gordon (1961), the importance of successful assimilation cannot be overemphasized in that racial minorities should eventually shift from their identification with their primary institutions (such as families) to identification with secondary institutions or social organizations based on “rational” cooperation (Solomonson 62-64).8 Assimilation as a conceptual model won its credibility in the early twentieth century, arguing that the dynamic process of racial interactions could be explained by the way in which immigrants or racial minorities took this route to assimilate (or even disappear) into mainstream American society
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