They had extemporized a verse made up of two insults
about matters over which the victim had no control: the
color of her skin and speculations on the sleeping habits
of an adult, wildly fitting in its incoherence. That they
themselves were black, or that their own father had
similarly relaxed habits was irrelevant. It was their
contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult
its teeth. They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly
cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred,
their elaborately designed hopelessness and it all
up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in
the hollows of their minds—cooled—and spilled over lips
of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path. They
danced a macabre ballet around the victim, whom, for
their own sake, they were prepared to sacrifice to the
flaming pit.
After years of procrastination, I'm finally reading The Bluest Eye
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