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Chapter 2
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
At age four, Maxine starts preschool. She’s excited, but she soon struggles with a classmate, Carlita Allen, who, on the first day of school, disgustedly points out that Maxine is “brown.” Maxine is of course aware of this, but this is the first time it occurs to her that looking different from most of her peers could be seen as undesirable. Carlita’s mother fails to reprimand her, causing Cleopatra to tense. In the first few years of Maxine’s life, Cleopatra has made herself a force within her majority-white community, but she still becomes extremely excited when she finds another Black woman to befriend and often forces the Clarke children to play with the other women’s children, with mixed results. Maxine doesn’t understand why being Black would make her have an inherent bond with other Black children, or why it would make it more difficult to bond with non-Black children.
Carlita functions as an important—but unfortunate—milestone in Maxine’s life: the first time she becomes consciously aware of the fact that people look down on Blackness. Her recollection of her mother’s joy at seeing other Black women and her insistence that Maxine play with other Black children, although well-intentioned, also confuses and alienates Maxine—she suggests she’s too young to fully understand why Black people would gravitate towards other Black people, rather than just bonding with people regardless of race. These thoughts show how Maxine is becoming more aware of racial dynamics in Australia.
Themes
Maxine begins to pay more attention to how many people of color are around her. She seems some in the media, but they still feel distant from her. Carlita continues to insult her at school. One day, the preschool teachers have the children say nice things about each other, and a girl with a lisp named Bella says that Maxine’s curly hair is pretty and that she’s very friendly. The preschool teachers agree, but Carlita says that Maxine’s hair is only curly because she’s “brown.” Maxine and Bella become friends, and Maxine develops a thick skin against Carlita’s insults, but Bella struggles emotionally when Carlita bullies her for her lisp. After seeing Bella cry during school drop-off, Maxine tells Cleopatra about Carlita. Cleopatra says it’s natural that nobody would want to spend time with Carlita since she’s a bully.
Carlita’s insults move from solely the color of Maxine’s skin to the texture of her hair, an example of how racism targets all of a person’s features. The fact that Carlita focuses on these aspects also suggests that she has learned this from an adult, as children do not independently learn to insult others based on race. Maxine’s ability to weather Carlita’s insults shows that she is already learning how to cope with racist harassment, and it’s a credit to Maxine’s character, even as a young child, that her anger is more for Bella than herself.
Themes
The day after telling Cleopatra about Carlita, Maxine decides to wait outside the school for Carlita. When Carlita arrives with her mother, Mrs. Allen, Maxine echoes what Cleopatra said, telling Carlita that she’s a bully and that nobody wants to play with her as a result. Mrs. Allen scolds Maxine, telling her that she’s a “nasty little black girl.” She then demands that Maxine apologize to Carlita and hold Carlita’s hand as the girls walk into school together. Maxine feels she hasn’t done anything wrong, but she feels pressure to comply with Mrs. Allen’s demands. As she walks into school with the smug Carlita, she thinks about her mother’s quiet anger when shopkeepers ignore them at the grocery store and wonders if it feels like the helpless, stifling fury she feels now.
Maxine’s interaction with Carlita’s mother marks her first experience being deeply humiliated as a result of her race. It is clear from the woman’s deeply hateful language that she has taught her daughter her racism, and she uses her power as an adult to force Maxine to give in. This moment also allows Maxine to contextualize her mother’s own moments of anger, which she now recognizes as a response to being dehumanized and humiliated as a Black person.
Themes
