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Chapter 23
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
Maxine becomes interested in acting and decides to audition for her school’s production of Twelfth Night. She is determined to get the lead role of Viola. Cleopatra helps her with her audition, but she asks who would be cast as Viola’s twin Sebastian—subtly pointing out that the school has no Black boys to play the part. Maxine is uncertain, but she auditions nonetheless. Her audition goes well, and she makes it into the play—not as Viola, but as Countess Olivia, the play’s famously beautiful and icy noblewoman. Maxine is shocked; she’d overlooked Olivia when reading the play, as she’d subconsciously believed she would never be qualified for the part. Cleopatra is thrilled for Maxine. When the two plan Maxine’s costumes, Cleopatra lets Maxine try on her wedding dress and tells her that she looks beautiful.
As with Cecelia’s modelling, Maxine getting cast as Countess Olivia upends ideas that Black women cannot be elegantly beautiful—or powerful. Maxine was so focused on the role of Viola that she did not even consider that Olivia, the intimidating and beautiful ice queen of the play, was a prospect for her. Although it is not the lead role, both Maxine and Cleopatra are just as overjoyed as they would have if she’d been cast as Viola, as the role symbolizes Maxine’s potential to become a powerful and majestic woman.
Themes
One day, Maxine has a strange interaction with Bordeaux, who tells her that she will always have to work 10 times as hard as everyone else because she’s a Black girl, then returns to his housework like the conversation never happened. Maxine brushes it off, but the next week, she comes home to find Bordeaux’s things gone. Maxine calls Cleopatra, who hurries home. While Maxine waits, Bronson arrives home, and she has to tell him what’s happened. It soon becomes clear that Bordeaux has been having an affair; although he never moves back in, he occasionally comes over to mow the lawn until Cleopatra changes the locks. Every other weekend, the Clarke children visit Bordeaux in Ryde, where he lives with his new partner, a short blonde woman. Maxine mournfully reflects on her parents’ fateful arrival to Australia together, all those years ago.
The memoir’s final chapter ends with the fracturing of the Clarke family as Bordeaux abandons them. Most notably, Bordeaux cheats on Cleopatra with a white woman, signifying the way that white supremacy and, more specifically, the denigration of Black women lead to strife even within Black families and communities. In recounting her parents’ divorce, Maxine mournfully connects the end of their relationship to the potential and hope they felt when they first moved to Australia, showing how the Clarkes’ experience in the country was nothing like they expected.
Themes
