The Hate Race Themes

In her memoir The Hate Race, author Maxine Beneba Clarke recounts her difficult experience as a young Black girl in 1980-90s Australia. While Maxine focuses heavily on her individual experiences with racism, she consistently contextualizes her own struggle within the larger legacy of racism within Australia. Before even introducing herself into the narrative, Maxine describes the history of Australia: how it was founded on the subjugation and murder of the indigenous people there, and…

Although Maxine Beneba Clarke explores racism on various levels, most chapters in The Hate Race focus on how children both experience and inflict racist ideals. This core part of the book is highlighted as early as the prologue, when an adult Maxine suffers racist harassment on the street while walking with her infant daughter. Her daughter is too young to realize what’s happening, but she is grateful that her slightly older son is not there…

Although the racist harassment that Maxine endures in The Hate Race is horrific, equally disturbing is the lack of intervention from adults and authority figures around Maxine who witness or are made aware of the way her peers bully her. Throughout the memoir, not a single teacher is shown to intervene on Maxine’s behalf in response to the severe bullying she deals with at school. In an especially egregious example, when Maxine begins to show…

From a young age, Maxine understands the harmful impact of words, particularly when her classmates bully her with racist slurs and nicknames that cause her to resent her own Blackness. One notable example is when, after Maxine develops vitiligo, her classmates call her “Patch” after one of her classmate’s dogs, which causes her to internalize the idea that others view her like an animal. This is only one of countless examples in which Maxine…