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Question

how does racial self-hatred manifest itself in the breedlove family as oppose to characters such as maureen peal and geraldine?

Answer 1

To begin with, the name "Breedlove" has a very negative connotation to it. The tone is set immediately: “Good” means being a member of a happy, well-to-do white family, a standard that is continually juxtaposed against “bad,” which means being black, flawed, and strapped for money. If one is to believe the first-grade primer, everyone is happy, well-to-do, good-looking, and white. One would never know that black people existed in this country. Against this laughing, playing, happy white background, Morrison juxtaposes the novel’s black characters, and she shows how all of them have been affected in some way by the white media—its movies, its books, its myths, and its advertising. For the most part, the blacks in this novel have blindly accepted white domination and have therefore given expensive white dolls to their black daughters at Christmas. Mr. Henry believes that he is being complimentary when he calls Frieda and Claudia “Greta Garbo” and “Ginger Rogers.” The schoolchildren—the black schoolboys, in particular—are mesmerized by the white-ish Maureen Peal, and Maureen herself enjoys telling about the black girl who dared to request a Hedy Lamarr hairstyle.
Standing midway between the white and black worlds is the exotic Maureen Peal, whose braids are described as “two lynch ropes.” Morrison’s chilling description of Maureen’s hair is intentional, for she is referring to the young black men who look in awe at the white-ish Maureen. These young men, she is saying, are symbolic of all of the black men who have allowed themselves to be mesmerized by Anglo standards of beauty. As a result, they turn on their own—just as the boys turn on Pecola. Her blackness forces the boys to face their own blackness, and thus they make Pecola the scapegoat for their own ignorance, for their own self-hatred, and for their own feelings of hopelessness. Pecola becomes the dumping ground for the black community’s fears and feelings of unworthiness.