the bluest eye

The Bluest Eye is about racism and sexism and poverty, but as little people know it. There's nothing in this book about the grand structures of injustice that continue to define life in the United States. Instead, it's about how a ten year old black girl comes to pray for blue eyes. The Bluest Eye is about big evils trickled down into tender psyches.

Cholly Breedlove hated women when he should have hated white people, but that would have "consumed him," "burned him up." 

Claudia: "I destroyed white baby dolls."

etc etc. 

And so much other stuff too, so much brilliant understanding of people and relationships, of "ministratin,' " of those human whores one can't damn or idealize, who burp when their hearts ought to melt and swoon when they ought to be crass. Of complicatedly ugly people, like that woman with her cat, who're consigned by those grand structures of injustice to dreadful situations, but then staking out that territory and implicating themselves in the dreadfulness.