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Summary
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 recounts an instance in which, while walking with her infant daughter to pick her five-year-old son from school, she is harassed by a racist man who pulls up in his car and tells her to drown her child. Maxine is petrified, but her daughter simply laughs at the loud voice, and Maxine is grateful that she’s too young to understand what’s going on. The man calls her a racial slur and tells her to go back to her country, then speeds off. Maxine walks tearfully to school, thinking about how much worse it would have been if the man had seen that her daughter is mixed-race. At the school, Maxine recounts her experience to another mother, who is horrified. However, Maxine doesn’t want sympathy; she just wants to stop experiencing these moments of racism, which have a cumulative psychological effect on her.
The anecdote that opens the memoir provides a stark illustration of the racism that Black people face in Australia. The contrast between the man’s vitriolic words and Maxine’s daughter’s laughter shows how the latter is too young to even understand the man’s racist words, juxtaposing her innocence with the man’s vile hatred. Furthermore, Maxine’s lukewarm response to the other mother’s attempt at support highlights how endemic this racism is: it is not a singular event that can be soothed by mere consolation, but a prolonged, structural issue.
Themes
Later, during school holidays, Maxine prepares to take her son to a theater show, which she is dreading. She finds herself wishing that she and her children could stay inside all the time in order to avoid racist abuse, such as the man in the car. She affirms that Australia is her country, as she was born here, the descendent of survivors of the Atlantic slave trade. She is proud to be the “descendant of those unbroken,” but she laments that her ancestral homeland in Africa might no longer recognize her or accept her spirit when she dies, as it’s been so long since her family has been there. She wonders if, in that instance, her soul will be spirited back to Australia, the only home she knows.
Maxine’s conflicted thoughts about her heritage illustrate the fraught history of Black Australians. Although she feels that Australia is her homeland, this feeling is complicated by the fact that she is descended from the Atlantic slave trade, meaning that her ancestors hailed from Africa. However, Maxine’s melancholy musing that her spirit would not be accepted by the continent highlights her difficulty in finding her place.
Themes
