In her novel The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison explores the themes of racism and capitalism, specifically from the perspective of the black experience in the United States. In general, the view of the characters in the novel is that the world is run by and for white people, especially white people with power and property, and that black people, particularly poor black people, are hurt in many ways by this racist, capitalist system.
One of the most destructive results of this racist, capitalist system is that black people come to feel so negatively about themselves and their race that they long to be white. The character of Pecola portrays this self-hatred and its destructive effects.
Morrison clearly believes every aspect of racism to be destructive to the victim of racism, but she does not argue that everything about capitalism is destructive. What is destructive is the difficulty faced by blacks who want to share in any meaningful way in that capitalist system:
Being a minority in both caste and class, we moved about
. . . on the hem of life, struggling to consolidate our weaknesses and hang on, or to creep singly up into the major folds of the garment. Our peripheral existence . . . was something we had learned to deal with. . . . Knowing that there was such a thing as outdoors bred in us a hunger for property, for ownership. The firm possession of a yard, a porch, a grape arbor. . . . Rented blacks cast furtive glances at these owned yards. . . . (18).
What makes capitalism evil to Morrison is that, one, the rewards of the system are denied most blacks because the "game" is unfair from the beginning, the rules favoring whites and disfavoring blacks, and, two, blacks who are excluded from capitalism's rewards feel so badly about themselves that they come to hate who and what they are. In the latter sense, capitalism is racism in an economic form.
Racism creates hatred not only of self but of "the other," wh...