God Help the Child

In God Help the Child (2015), the overarching argument of this article is that Sweetness is incapable of conveying a meaningful reflection of her “true self”. Her frailty to love and respect herself makes her vulnerable to exchange the same emotions with Bride. The objective of this paper is to scrutinize the impact of colorism and color-blindness on the lives of African-American women. We try to respond to two fundamental questions, namely how can “looking-glass-self” theory be applied on the maternal bond between Sweetness and Bride? and second, what is the impact of intersectionality or matrix of the social domination on the lives of Sweetness and Bride in God Help the Child (2015)? Drawing upon Collins’s Black Feminist and Winnicott’s Psychoanalytic theories, we try to examine multi-faceted aspects of racism, including reverse racism, structural racism, intersectionality, matrix of the social domination, and common stereotypical images attributed to Black women with a holistic approach. Although socio-cultural White ideology is dominant to Bride’s Blackness, Bride rescues herself from the hatred of her own world by furnishing a kind of domination over other women and companies by her physical beauty and success in expanding cosmetics business. She turns her dark skin color into a marvelous asset in the guise of the White clothing.