Summary
As Clarke approaches senior high school, increasingly more students drop out to get jobs or join trade programs. Life at school becomes more bearable. Clarke has another short-lived relationship, this time with a fellow debate team member named Marcus. He doesn’t care who knows about them being together, and the two are seen around school arm in arm. Clarke feels the well-meaning awkwardness of his parents as they try to welcome her into the fold while nonetheless making reference to her different racial background.
Things change for Clarke when Marcus casually eats Golliwog biscuits one day, which alarms Selina and Clarke. He also comments on the difference between her brown hand and pink palm, saying the contrast is cute, like a possum paw. Clarke is transported back to all the times bullies compared her to animals. The relationship fizzles out, much to Marcus’s confusion.
In the mid-nineties, there is a shift in public and political sentiment toward immigration and multiculturalism. A conservative independent, Pauline Hanson, is elected to the House of Representatives, having attracted the vote of xenophobes. The Labor prime minister loses to the conservative Liberal Party leader, John Howard, in 1996.
At school, efforts are made to celebrate multiculturalism, and Selina is asked to perform bellydancing for an audience of other students. Not wanting to be left out, Clarke claims to her teachers that she practices tribal dancing. The dancing she ends up performing comprises invented movements, but people thank her for her cultural display. The lie doesn’t catch up with her until her mother mentions having heard about it from another parent. Clarke doesn’t explain herself, but her tribal dancing career ends then.
After Clarke and her sister get braces, Cecelia’s beauty shines through even more. To her father’s disapproval, she joins a Model Quest competition, winning her first local heat. Clarke joins her mother and Bronson as they attend Cecelia’s modeling events, following and cheering her on all the way to the final. In the last event, Clarke sees her sister’s blackness as being intertwined with her beauty; she is not a “blank slate” beauty like the plain-looking thin white girls in the show. While Cecelia doesn’t win, Clarke believes everyone in the room knows she is the real winner of the competition.
When Clarke wants to audition to play Viola in Twelfth Night, her mother points out that Viola has a twin brother, Sebastian, and asks who would play him to look like her twin. She jokes that they could cast her and cast a white boy in blackface. Clarke and her mother collapse with laughter; Clarke says the school would. She is disappointed to get the role of Countess Olivia—a main role still, but fewer lines than Viola. Her mother is delighted and pulls out her wedding dress—which she made—for Clarke to wear in the play’s wedding scene.
Clarke comes home from school one day to discover her dad has taken his stereo and record collection out of the house. She phones her mother, who asks Clarke to check the closet; sure enough, his clothing is gone. Bronson comes home and Clarke has to explain their father has left. It comes out that he’d been seeing another woman for years. Clarke’s mother gets on with life. Clarke’s father turns up sometimes to mow their lawn, take a shower, and leave. One day, Clarke watches as he discovers Cleopatra has changed the locks. Every second Saturday, Bronson and Clarke spend the day with him and his new partner, who is a white woman with blonde hair and green eyes. Clarke comments, “Dad’s new partner wasn’t a patch on my mum,” meaning that the girlfriend was nothing in comparison.
In the epilogue, Clarke returns to the present-day frame of the prologue. It is the end of her son’s first school holidays. He can’t wait to return to school. While walking there, he realizes he left his water bottle at home. They stop at a petrol station and Clarke buys one. The attendant coos at the baby Clarke carries in a sling and says, “It’s amazing, how you people carry your babies. It just seems to be, like, instinctive!” The comment induces “that can’t-think freeze,” transporting Clarke to her childhood, to Carlita’s disapproving appraisal of Clarke on the first day of preschool.
On her way home, Clarke stops in the park across the street from her flat. She unties the sling and lets her daughter sit in the cool grass. Clarke lies down. She looks over and sees her daughter collecting fistfuls of dirt in her mouth. Clarke comments that she knows this is her children’s country; they were born on this beautiful, scorched, and stolen land. Her children are also the ancestors of the slaves dragged from their homes, chained by their necks, and put to work on the harshest plantations on earth by the cruelest masters in the history of the Atlantic slave trade. The memoir ends with Clarke saying her children are “the descendants of those unbroken.”
In her acknowledgments, Clarke declares that she loves Australia, but she believes people can be kinder to each other, and more equitable. She says she believes stories like hers need to be heard. She wanted to show the lasting impact of being brown in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s. She wanted to show the toll that “casual, overt and institutionalized racism can take: the way it erodes us all.” She acknowledges that certain timelines have been condensed for the sake of narrative, and names have been changed to avoid lawsuits she can’t afford as a poet. She apologizes for her tribal dance hoax, and to “Bhagita” for what she said, adding that the guilt will stay with her for an eternity.
Analysis
Toward the end of high school, Clarke discovers that student attrition works to her benefit: As more and more kids drop out to take up trades or full-time service sector jobs because they aren’t academically inclined, the more-studious students left in school don’t subject Clarke to the same racist harassment. With this comment, Clarke insinuates that there is a correlation between racist aggression and lower intelligence, as the smarter kids don’t bully her.
But while Clarke confronts less overt racism, everyday racism continues to be an issue. While dating Marcus, Clarke is pleased to know he isn’t embarrassed by her and that he seems to appreciate her for who she is. However, his white parents, despite being well-meaning, make her feel that her race is conspicuous when they spontaneously talk about Martin Luther King Jr. or ask her if they are using politically correct terms.
Marcus himself begins to lose Clarke’s trust when he casually eats Scalliwag Biscuits—formerly Golliwog Biscuits—and brushes off Clarke’s and Selina’s outrage over his tacit endorsement of the racially insensitive product. He makes Clarke uncomfortable again when he comments on the difference between her palm and the back of her hand, comparing the contrast in skin tone to that of a possum. To be likened to an animal triggers Clarke’s trauma over having been dehumanized by racist bullies; Clarke realizes she cannot trust that Marcus doesn’t see her as different in the way so many others have.
Clarke continues to report on the changing political climate of her adolescence, commenting on the ousting of Labor in 1996 and the election of a xenophobe like Pauline Hanson, who founded the far-right One Nation party and remains in elected office to this day. But despite the conservative shift, Clarke’s school attempts to celebrate diversity and inclusion with Multicultural Day. In an instance of dramatic irony, Clarke—not wanting to be left out of the festivities—lies about knowing how to perform traditional African tribal dances, and performs invented routines for her school. In stark contrast to Clarke’s desire to blend in as white when she is in kindergarten, Clarke at seventeen willingly exploits people’s exoticization of her Black identity.
To cap off The Hate Race, Clarke returns to the present-day frame she established in the prologue. In the epilogue, Clarke comments on how she has spent much of her son’s summer holidays indoors, still shaken by the racist stranger’s verbal attack. Sure enough, on the day her son starts school again, Clarke deals with another instance of racism—this time the everyday racism of a gas-station attendant who invokes the trope of African-descended people being more “instinctive” in their habits.
Although Clarke wishes to keep her children safe from the racism she has endured and continues to contend with, she knows Australia continues to wrestle with its colonial, white-supremacist legacy. Clarke ends the memoir by reminding herself that she and her children are the descendants of people who survived the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade. Because these “unbroken” people are part of her and her children’s heritage, they can thrive despite the racist injustices that persist in the twenty-first century.
