The Hate Race - Quotes

Question 1

Clarke

Answer 1

• “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”

Question 2

Beginning and end

Answer 2

• 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”

Question 3

Cleopatra and Bordeaux first arriving in Australia

Answer 3

• “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”

Question 4

Maxine’s first day of preschool - 1983

Answer 4

• “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.”

Question 5

Introducing herself to her class

Answer 5

• “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?”

Question 6

Student of the week card

Answer 6

• “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”

Question 7

Cabbage Patch Kid

Answer 7

• “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”

Question 8

Gymnastics

Answer 8

• “I felt conspicuous among the other mostly white girls with their long, straight ponytails and their flat bottoms”

Question 9

Vitiligo

Answer 9

• “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”

Question 10

Bicentenary

Answer 10

• “Captain Phillip tried hard to be friendly, but the Aborigines were violent and hostile”

Question 11

BMX

Answer 11

• “My friend’s silence hurts more than the names we’d been called - more than seeing my brothers bloody, grazed knee”

Question 12

Mrs. Hird reaction to Maxine’s complaint of racism - year 5

Answer 12

• “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”

Question 13

Maxine bullying Dereck Healy

Answer 13

• “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”

Question 14

Discovering Slavery

Answer 14

• “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”

Question 15

Dux award

Answer 15

• “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”

Question 16

Redfern Speech

Answer 16

• “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”

Question 17

Greg Adams Fuck Chart

Answer 17

• “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”

Question 18

Greg Adams and his friend Lachlan Jones

Answer 18

• “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”

Question 19

Bystander Complicity

Answer 19

• 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”

Question 20

Chemically straightening her hair

Answer 20

• “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”

Question 21

Doctors appointment for keloid scarring

Answer 21

• “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.”

Question 22

Bhagita

Answer 22

• “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”

Question 23

Maxine and Selina reporting everything

Answer 23

• “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”

Question 24

Interview for Lions Club Youth of the Year competition

Answer 24

• “Where are you from, Maxine?”
• “Frank was leaning forward, a patronising smile on his face”
• “You have those striking African looks”

Question 25

Marcus

Answer 25

• “Like a paw or something. Like a possum paw”

Question 26

Multicultural Day

Answer 26

• 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”

Question 27

Miscellaneous

Answer 27

• “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”

Question 28

Literary devices

Answer 28

• 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

Question 29

Twelfth Night

Answer 29

• “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”

Question 30

Role models

Answer 30

• 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