Through My Eyes

Through My Eyes highlights the perspective of a child, who, even though tasked with a significant mission towards achieving equal rights for Black Americans, had no way to understand its larger context. Racist rhetoric in American history long stressed that there were inherent, natural differences in people of different races and that one could rank races by intelligence, abilities, and level of civilization. These notions were entirely false and used to uphold official systems of inequality that, in the United States, supported white supremacy and denied people of color the full protection of the law and the best resources and facilities. The book makes it clear that racism is not natural, despite the establishment of these racist social norms.

The children in the story do not understand racism. Bridges says towards the beginning of the book that “young children never know about racism at the start. It’s we adults who teach it” (4). Ruby Bridges and her Black peers certainly encountered racism directly and absorbed pieces of it. For example, white segregationists outside of the William Frantz school in the morning explicitly threatened Bridges (22). Bridges also remembered chanting a jump roping song with lyrics she had heard at school: “Two, four, six, eight, we don’t want to integrate” (20).