The Hate Race Literary Elements

Memoir

The memoir details Maxine Beneba Clarke's experience growing up Black in Sydney, Australia in the 1980s and 1990s.

Maxine Beneba Clarke is the narrator; the point of view stays with her.

The tone is variously academic, poetic, and confessional; the mood shifts between comedic and despondent.

The protagonist is Maxine Beneba Clarke; the primary antagonists are Carlita Allen and other racist white bullies.

The major conflict is that Clarke enjoys learning and being in school but is constantly reminded of her minority status by bullies and ignorant authority figures.

The story reaches its climax when Maxine's father abandons the family, leaving Clarke's mother for his white mistress.

When Clarke notices her neighbors watching her enter her house, their concerned expressions foreshadow the revelation that Clarke's father has moved his possessions out while the neighbors watched.

When discussing her parents' stay at the Man Friday Hotel, Clarke alludes to the 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe. In the book, Crusoe's servant is a former cannibal he calls "my man Friday."

An example of paradox occurs when Clarke's father says, "Black girls don't do gymnastics!" The seemingly absurd statement proves well-founded when Clarke finds that her race sets her apart from the lean white girls in her gymnastics class, who have no trouble tucking in their flat bottoms as the racially insensitive coach demands.

Clarke uses the rhetorical device of parallelism with the grammatically balanced phrasing of: "This is how it changes us. This is how we're altered."