Dandelions and Black People

So far in The Bluest Eye, we've noticed that beauty is not a physical object that one can attain. Beauty is something very abstract, yet we try and give it a set of standards to cope with the fact that we can not define it. Like the Holocaust, how can we describe the indescribable without drastically taking away from what it stands for. Beauty can not be allowed to follow a set of standards because of the way beauty is perceived differently by everyone. For example, Dandelions are used as a parallel for black people, many people have a prejudice towards them, but without much reasoning. Pecola finds beauty in the dandelions, asking, "Why ... do people call them weeds? [I] think they [are] pretty", but after her encounter with a racist store owner, she feels ashamed of her race and then promptly calls the dandelions ugly and that dandelions are simply just weeds (Morrison 47). At first, Pecola thinks that she is just like the others, beautiful in her own way, but after her racist encounter with a shopkeeper she begins to feel this "inexplicable shame ebb" (Morrison 50). There's no logical reason for the shopkeeper to discriminate against Pecola, but he does so with an illogical, yet passionate hatred. His only "reasoning" for this discrimination is because everyone else is discriminating as well. Likewise to the dandelions, Pecola first saw beauty in them, but she then gave into the societal standards of what plants are considered "ugly" and "weeds".