The Media

The Media rarely gives a fair representation of the world. It hides certain things that wouldn't please governments and only presents issues in allied countries. For example, on November 13, 2015, there was a terrorist attack on Paris, France. However, the events of the earthquake in Japan, bombings in Beirut, and the landslide in China aren't being emphasized. All the news outlets bombard its audience with more news on Paris while all the other deaths are being glanced over. The majority of the citizens have no idea any of this ever happened. 

Beirut Bombing

China Landslide

In The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Pauline gets obsessed with white beauty because of the Media's bias towards white beauty standards. She starts to go to the movies in order to escape her black reality, and it causes her to subconsciously judge a face into "some category in the scale of absolute beauty" (122) that she absorbed from the screen. This is just like how the Media today discriminates Muslims as terrorists and as people who cannot be tolerated. As a result, many individuals automatically assume that Muslims are dangerous and shouldn't be treated with respect. The movies also force Pauline to believe that being white and having a white family is the way to live. She knows that she can't reach this standard but she allows it to consume her thoughts and appearance. She desperately tries to look like "white" by copying Jean Harlow and fixes her "hair up like [she'd] seen hers on a magazine" (123). Nevertheless when her tooth falls out, her only chance of happiness gets utterly crushed. This leaves me to wonder if the movies had illustrated that everyone is beautiful for Pauline, would she have been happy with her life? Or if she had never even gone to the movies, could she have lived a happier life?