Using racially contextualized models of trauma studies and psychoanalysis, this article explores the trauma of racially inflected language in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970). The American Symbolic ties racial Blackness to abjection in contradistinction to the master signifier of whiteness and systematically perpetuates the Black subject's encounter with the traumatic lack of subjectivity. This signifying chain of trauma implicates not just the Breedlove family but also the entire Black community, including even a seemingly adaptive subject like Claudia MacTeer, whom critics have designated as the "arch-survivor" over and against Pecola Breedlove the "victim." Morrison engages in a narrative therapy of sorts that loosens the reader's fixation with the racial Symbolic and presents an alternative idiom that can empower the disenfranchised. The novel's rendition of the structural, mundane aspects of language-based trauma thus invites us to revisit the traditional conceptions of trauma as a cataclysmic event.