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Chapter 20
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Hate Race, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Racial Discrimination in Australia
Racism, Childhood, and Loss of Innocence
Race and Beauty Standards
Injustice and Complicity
The Power of Words
Summary
Analysis
Later in high school, many of Maxine’s bullies leave for trade school and other jobs, making her life easier. Along with Selina, she hangs out with her former debate club teammates, and she begins to go out with a boy named Marcus. Sometime after they start dating, Marcus invites Maxine over to swim, which makes her nervous since she’s never met his parents before. When she goes over, his parents are friendly, but they try too hard in a way that Maxine finds alienating, such as Marcus’s father talking to her about how his boss once met Martin Luther King, Jr. However, Maxine greatly enjoys her swim with Marcus, forgetting all her prior self-consciousness when she’s with him.
Towards the end of high school, Maxine gets a little bit of room to breathe, both with her bullies leaving and from her new relationship with Marcus. However, compared to her relationship with Mick, whose parents she knew from a young age, Marcus’s parents’ overenthusiastic behavior towards Maxine leads to a little bit more discomfort in the relationship. Notably, it doesn’t seem that Marcus ever intervenes in these rather awkward conversations.
Themes
Maxine’s relationship with Marcus begins to break down after she sees him eating “Scallywag”—formerly named “Gollywog”—crackers, which are chocolate crackers in the shape of the eponymous anti-Black caricature. Marcus laughs it off, saying they’re just crackers, but the incident weighs on Maxine. Tension between them increases further when Marcus compares Maxine’s hands to the paws of a possum, which deeply upsets her and brings up memories of her being compared to a dog. Marcus apologizes profusely, but the distance between them increases, and they eventually break up.
Maxine’s breakup with Marcus illustrates a potential issue within interracial relationships: even if two people deeply like each other, if one of them has internalized racism they have not unlearned, it can lead to unintended microaggressions and emotional rifts. This is clearly the case with Maxine, where Marcus’s smaller moments of racism eventually build up to be too much for her to continue the relationship.
Themes
