The Hate Race - Quotes Flashcards
1
Q
Clarke
A
- “constant acknowledgement that I’m addressing you (the audience)”
- “It was this idea of people being so ready to stereotype you, to assume that you have a particular knowledge or a particular background”
- “There’s a character for everyone”
- Purpose - “Both give voice to the experiences of Australians of colour and try and explain the kind of cumulative effect of racism”
2
Q
Beginning and end
A
- Beginning - “Fuck off you black bitch…go drown your kid”
- Ending - “It’s amazing how you people hold your babies”
- “Suddenly, there’s that chest-tightening feeling. That hear-in-my-throat, pulse-in-my-temples fear. The dry tongue. The gasping for breath. The nakedness. The remembering how it can happen anywhere, at any time. That can’t think freeze”
- “This is my country, that much I am sure.” → “This is my childrens country, of that I am sure.”
- “I am the descendant of the unbroken” → “My children are the descendants of those unbroken”
3
Q
Cleopatra and Bordeaux first arriving in Australia
A
- “What kind of country is this?”
- “Help Street it read, the white letters screaming out against the dark background”
- “they’d been directed towards the cheap, nasty booze assumed to be their consumption of choice”
4
Q
Maxine’s first day of preschool - 1983
A
- “It never occurred to me that being brown…was in any way relevant to anything”
- “There lurked, in the small girl’s declaration, an implied deficiency”
- Carlita’s Mother “picked a cotton thread from her peach-coloured blouse. She held the thread out between thumb and forefinger…The thin cotton wisp floated slowly down to the ground”
- “At five and a half, racism had already changed me.”
- ” After a while you start to breathe it.”
5
Q
Introducing herself to her class
A
- “I wanted the other kids to know … all of the things they hadn’t asked because I was just the brown kid. Today was my one opportunity to let everyone know I wasn’t just that”
- “Where are you from”
- “What do they actually do?”
- “Is your mum really and actress”
- “I think you have a very vivid imagination. And what does your father really do for a job?”
6
Q
Student of the week card
A
- “Maxine is brown/ Maxine has brown skin/ Maxine has funny curly hair”
- “Names did hurt. They hurt deep inside my chest. They hurt inside my head. They hurt inside my heart”
- “Because they contained combinations of words that took me into other worlds, allowed me to escape for that brief moment of relief”
7
Q
Cabbage Patch Kid
A
- “All the girls who already had a Cabbage Patch Kid would want to come over to my house and play”
- The Cabbage Patch kid was brown - “something wrong with the hands…not normal”
- “Overcome with disappointment”
8
Q
Gymnastics
A
- “I felt conspicuous among the other mostly white girls with their long, straight ponytails and their flat bottoms”
9
Q
Vitiligo
A
- “Against anything I had ever been told was possible, I was turning white… On the surface of my skin, a miracle was quietly brewing”
- “Go get the ball, Patch! Go fetch!”
- “I felt like I was free-falling through space. I wanted out, to not exist anymore”
- “I learned that it was probably my fault anyway, and that what they were doing to me was perfectly okay. This is how it alters us. This is how we change”
- “ugly duckling becoming a swan”
10
Q
Bicentenary
A
- “Captain Phillip tried hard to be friendly, but the Aborigines were violent and hostile”
11
Q
BMX
A
- “My friend’s silence hurts more than the names we’d been called - more than seeing my brothers bloody, grazed knee”
12
Q
Mrs. Hird reaction to Maxine’s complaint of racism - year 5
A
- “powerful as if now that I could name the thing that was happening to me, it had become real”
- “How dare you accuse a classmate of something like that?”
- “I hated her with a ferocity that frightened me”
- “I wanted to make her hurt. I wanted to humiliate her in front of the whole school. I wanted her to disappear”
13
Q
Maxine bullying Dereck Healy
A
- “It made me feel both remorseful and powerful at the same time.”
- “Their tears leaving me feeling oddly satisfied”
- “Racism that was as commonplace as cornflakes”
- “Less humiliating than remaining silent in the face of so many years of bullying; much less humiliating than letting myself be crushed”
14
Q
Discovering Slavery
A
- “The page was black and white, not coloured like the rest of the book”
- “Slavery felt like a shameful thing to be descended from”
- “Awful secret”
- “I wondered if all of the people who called me and my family names and treated us badly did it because…they knew we weren’t actual people”
15
Q
Dux award
A
- “An odd mixture of pride and shock” - on her parents faces
- “That was a stroke of luck, wasn’t it?”
- “The only conceivable explanation was that it was political correctness gone mad. To him, the alternative was just not feasible - was unthinkable”
- “The Aborgignal characters in the book I’d been given were cheerful and simple-minded”
16
Q
Redfern Speech
A
- “It begins.. with that act of recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life”
17
Q
Greg Adams Fuck Chart
A
- “He said he couldn’t even put me at the end of the list because animals didn’t count”
- “Its just a bit of teasing”
18
Q
Greg Adams and his friend Lachlan Jones
A
- “Every time Greg Adams was reprimanded, the bullying got worse”
- “What are you? What are you? What are you?” - “blackie”
- Anaphoric “Somewhere along the line…”, repetitive listing of taunts and “What are you?”
- “Somewhere along the line, we die a little”
- “There was a place I went to, inside my head. A red-black pulsing place that was both dark and brilliant”
- “I tried to claw my way out of my skin”
19
Q
Bystander Complicity
A
- The grade eight girls - “that awful, aching silence about them”
- “that hurtful bystander complicity I still remembered from the BMX track when I was back in primary school”
- “Theirs was a silence most deafening”
20
Q
Chemically straightening her hair
A
- “But I was convinced there were things I could do which would bring me closer, at least to popularity”
- “hated the unruly afro-frizz which escaped from my ponytail”
21
Q
Doctors appointment for keloid scarring
A
- “The doctor examined me: as if I were some kind of throwback species”
- “Barely concealing his intrigue”
- “My colour was again betraying me; my history asserting itself.”
22
Q
Bhagita
A
- “Trauma manifested itself on my skin”
- “ I looked different. I felt regal. I felt beautiful.” “I looked more Western. More acceptable. More like them.”
- “They’re so pretty! Oh my god, you look just like Brandy”
- “There was something in my classmate’s tone that was chastising. PityingI. Rage swelled inside me”
- “I felt like I wasn’t in my body. Like I was watching the whole exchange unfold outside me”
- “I didn’t know what I was doing, but I knew exactly what I was doing. I was on autopilot, yet I knew I could stop at any time”
- “Too much power is never a good thing”
23
Q
Maxine and Selina reporting everything
A
- “We could see the grimace on his face when he saw us approaching, but there was no escape: he was duty-bound to listen”
- “We forced the school management to notice. We made them take care of business”
24
Q
Interview for Lions Club Youth of the Year competition
A
- “Where are you from, Maxine?”
- “Frank was leaning forward, a patronising smile on his face”
- “You have those striking African looks”
25
Q
Marcus
A
- “Like a paw or something. Like a possum paw”
26
Q
Multicultural Day
A
- Civil Rights speech from a few years ago - “felt strangely triumphant that my tourentor would first have to listen to me preach tolerance for five minutes”
- “Those in traditional dress would be mercilessly bullied”
- “A handful of students were trotted out to spruik their wares”
- “I was angry that the school did little to combat the insidious racism I dealt with on a daily basis, but was happy to watch me utilise my blackness … or parade me … around when the circumstances suited”
- “Oddly enough I was bullied much less for my tribal dancing display than I was for my general existence”
- “jumped, stamped, wiggled”
27
Q
Miscellaneous
A
- “It was always the sea that brought bloodshed to our lands; the ocean on which they arrived to destroy us; the tide on which they stole us away”
- Library - “a refuge for geeks, misfits and outcasts”
- “My white knee-high socks dug into my sweaty mahogany shins”
- Reinforcing her identity
- Paddle pops, chicken and lettuce sandwiches, John Farnham, Play School, Milky Ways
- “He shuffles out of school babbling incoherent, offering nonsensical insights into various parts of his day”
- “Catch and Kiss”
28
Q
Literary devices
A
- Repetitive slurs
- Chronological narrative
- Hope through movement/ progression
- Motif of West Indian storytelling
- “There’s that folklore way West Indians have, of weaving a talk: facts just so, gasps and guffaws in all the right places - because what else is a story for?”
- Sarcasm - pretending that she will entertain as that is her only job - however there is deeper meaning
- Rhetorical question - challenging audience to not remain implicit
- “There’s that folklore way West Indians have, of weaving a talk: facts just so, gasps and guffaws in all the right places - because what else is a story for?”
29
Q
Twelfth Night
A
- “This is how we see ourselves. This is how we are crushed”
- Not auditioning for big role of Olivia - instead Viola
- “Un-becoming yourself. Slipping on another skin. Masking the truth. Playing realities. I’d always been attracted to the artifice of acting”
30
Q
Role models
A
- Inspired by successful/ resilience
- Bordeaux was first man of African descent to be given a pHD from an english university
- Idolises Florence Griffith
- “If you want it bad enough just take it”
- Becomes the role model for her children
