-Not Seeing Past Skin Color
From the beginning of The Blacker The Berry, there were great similarities to Larsen’s Passing. Irene Redfield and Emma Lou are both the main voices in the novel. The readers only hear one side of every story and this is what they must trust. This makes the narration very unreliable and quite deceiving. One characteristic about Irene Redfield that I noticed in Emma is the judgmental thinking. Irene judged everyone and everything that surrounded her and Emma does the same in this novel. The narration of this novel allows us to get inside the protagonist’s head but it does not mean that this results in a reliable narration.
Similarities between Irene and Emma are very apparent throughout the rest of the novel as well. “Emma Lou was too powerless to resist”(p.20). This reminded me of Irene because she could not resist Clare in Passing. Also, Irene was easily influenced and discriminating towards others, which is seen in Emma Lou’s character. Emma Lou judges everyone around her by their skin color. What she chooses to believe solely depends on the person’s color. What she sees rarely goes beyond a person’s color. We see that Emma belittles everyone who is dark-skin before even getting to know them and often this is the rest of her experience with that person. This is shown in her relationship with Hazel and John. However, when a person is lighter-skinned, she treats the person a completely different way even if they do not treat her well. This is what makes everything Emma Lou unreliable. She simply does not see past the skin color because she resents her own skin color and this makes her an untrustworthy narrator.
