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 were irrelevant. It was their contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult its teeth. They seemed to have taken all their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery scorn that had burned for ages in the hollow minds- cooled- and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path.
