Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signsall the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured
Interpretation
This quote critiques societal standards of beauty and the unrealistic expectations placed on young girls.
Toni Morrison's quote highlights the societal consensus that often dictates what is considered beautiful and desirable for young girls. The emphasis on specific physical traits—blue eyes, blonde hair, and fair skin—underscores the limitations and biases of cultural representations of femininity, suggesting that such narrow definitions can shape the self-image and aspirations of girls in detrimental ways.
In practice
During a discussion on beauty standards in a classroom setting.
There is a certain kind of peace that is not merely the absence of war. It is larger than that. The peace I am thinking of is not at the mercy of history's rule, nor is it a passive surrender to the status quo. The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one -- an activity that occurs most naturally, most often in the reading/writing world we live in. Accessible as it is, this particular kind of peace warrants vigilance.
You looking good." "Devil's confusion. He lets me look good long as I feel bad.
What do you say? There really are no words for that. There really aren't. Somebody tries to say, 'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.' People say that to me. There's no language for it. Sorry doesn't do it. I think you should just hug people and mop their floor or something.
An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.
Like friendship, hatred needed more than physical intimacy; it wanted creativity and hard work to sustain itself
One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to.
It's like, hmm, there's people with $2000 weaves that could have bought health care with that weave money. They don't have insurance. People want what they want. And I guess that is a reason we have this big credit card problem and a lot of these foreclosures.
The historical basis for the gap between the black middle class and underclass shows that ending discrimination, by itself, would not eradicate black poverty and dysfunction. We also need intervention to promulgate a middle-class ethic of success among the poor, while expanding opportunities for economic betterment.
If you have someone who is paying 88 percent of her income on rent, and we have laws that allow a landlord to evict a tenant who falls behind under those circumstances, eviction becomes an inevitability.
The prison-industrial complex, poverty, and the school system has more effect on a young black male in America than Jay-Z does, by far. And that's not a diss to Jay-Z. The crime rate in the black community was high before hip hop. Rapping about it is just a reflection of the life a lot of people are living.
This society cannot go forward, the way we have been going forward, where the gap between the rich and the poor keeps growing. It's not politically viable; it's not morally right; it's just not going to happen.
The ideas of individual supremacy and the right of free expression, when carried to excess, have not worked. They have made it difficult to keep America society cohesive. Asia can see it is not working.. In America itself, there is widespread crime and violence, old people feel forgotten, families are falling apart. And the media attacks the integrity and character of your leaders with impunity, drags down all those in authority and blames everyone but itself.
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