The Hate Race Study Guide

Clarke was born in Kellyville, a suburb of Sydney, Australia, in 1979. Her father is a Jamaican British mathematician, and her mother is a Guyanese British former actress. The middle child of three siblings, Clarke often struggled during her childhood due to racism from her peers and teachers, which heavily influenced her self-esteem and mental health as she grew up. However, she found solace in writing and rhetoric, which allowed her to take control over her own narrative and words. She obtained a Bachelor of Creative arts from the University of Wollongong. She began her writing career with short stories and poems before publishing The Hate Race in 2016. She currently lives in Melbourne, Australia and was named University of Melbourne’s Peter Steele Poet in Residence in 2023.

The Hate Race primarily focuses on Clarke’s upbringing, but the events of her life are intertwined with the history of racism not only in Australia, but in the world at large. For instance, Clarke’s realization that she is the descendant of Atlantic Slave Trade survivors is an important moment of her childhood, and the only reason she is raised in Australia in the first place is due to her parents fleeing increasing racial tension in 1970s Britain. Clarke also discusses Australian historical events, such as the White Australia policy and the subjugation of Aboriginal Australians, which may seem like distant history but have had lasting impacts on Australian society. In addition, throughout the memoir, Clarke recounts her own experiences witnessing contemporary historical events, such as the acknowledgement of Australia’s Aboriginal people in 1992. In doing this, Clarke contextualizes her own life within the broader landscape of racism.

Before The Hate Race, Clarke published her 2014 short story collection Foreign Soil. Although this book is fiction rather than a memoir, the stories within the anthology focus on Black and predominantly immigrant characters struggling to find their place in the world, channeling Clarke’s own experiences into storytelling. The story “Shu Yi” in particular, in which a Black girl named Ava bullies her eponymous Chinese classmate to earn acceptance from her white peers, parallels Clarke’s own experience with her classmate Bhagita, which she regretfully recounts in her memoir. In addition, American author Ta-Nehisi Coates’s nonfiction book Between the World and Me similarly draws connections between the author’s personal experiences with racism and the broader structural racism at play. Structured as a letter to Coates’s son, Coates interweaves his upbringing in Baltimore with analysis of the white supremacy inherent to American society.