Soiled

"And now when I see her searching the garbage - for what? The thing we assassinated? I talk about how I did not plant the seeds too deeply, how it was the fault of the earth, the land, of our town. I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live. We are wrong, of course, but it doesn't matter. It's too late. At least on the edge of my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my town, it's much, much, much too late" (Morrison 206).

The last paragraph of The Bluest Eye provides the perfect tie-in with the second prologue of the novel with the recurring extended metaphor of Pecola and the marigold seeds. This extremely impactful passage, although written in simple and straightforward language, reveals a powerful underlying truth: the prevalence of racism and oppression is due not to the flaws of the blacks, but to the hostility of the world around them.
Society, with its multitude of prejudices, assumptions, and standards, represents the unyielding soil; the individuals who make it up constitute the seeds planted within. Just as some flowers are able to not only survive, but thrive, stripping away the land and nutrients for remaining seeds to flourish, the whites of society have established themselves at the top of the social hierarchy, leaving no freedom or probability for the colored to create lives for themselves. In the harsh reality of the real world, it is truly the survival of the fittest - the result is a thoroughly selective landscape that will inevitably force the weaker seeds to never sprout again. "Certain seeds [the land] will not nurture", and certain classes of individuals society will never receive.
When Claudia finally realizes that she did not plant the seeds too deeply, that the blacks are not faulty, not ugly, not inferior, it is too late. The world, just like the nature that adorns it, has already evolved to cultivate exclusively those whose roots have grasped the soil since the dawn of life.

My genius editing job