Summary
Narrated in the first-person by the memoir’s author, Maxine Beneba Clarke, The Hate Race opens with Clarke walking through the suburban inner-east area of Melbourne, Australia. She is going to pick up her five-year-old son from school and pushes her five-month-old daughter in a stroller. A white man in a ute (SUV) slows down to shout racist abuses at Clarke. Calling her “black bitch” and “nigger,” the man tells her to go back to her own country and says she should drown her kid. Her daughter laughs obliviously, kicking her fat legs. Clarke doesn’t turn to look at the young white man. Around the corner, she sits on a fence and weeps.
Days later, Clarke doesn’t want to leave her house or expose her children to the racist abuse she experienced as a child. She was born in Australia in 1979, the child of Black British parents. Her ancestors were slaves, taken from West Africa to the Caribbean. She is proud to carry “the burnished mahogany” complexion of her ancestors, but her connection to Africa is four hundred years old. She imagines that, when she dies, her spirit will be denied entry to the continent and be “sent packing to Australia,” which is the only country she and her children know.
In the first chapter, Clarke re-tells a story she’s heard many times: how her parents came to Australia. Her father, Bordeaux Mathias Nathanial Clarke, was born in Kingston, Jamaica. He and his parents migrated to London when he was young, persuaded by British immigration officers who encouraged migration because there were post-WWII labor shortages in Britain. At twenty-five, Bordeaux got a Ph.D. in mathematics from a British university—one of the first people in his community to do so. Waves of Caribbean migrants settled throughout London, gradually setting up businesses and communities, but not without the occasional racist attacks or harassment from working-class whites and political fear-mongering around immigration.
When the UK’s post-war economic boom faltered, Bordy and his wife, Cleopatra, a Guyanese-descended actress, take a friend’s advice and sought to move to Australia. The country has a reputation for not welcoming Black people, having had in place since 1919 the White Australia Policy, which prioritized white immigrants. But the new prime minister, Gough Whitlam, wants to increase immigration and award land rights to the Indigenous Australians who’d been dispossessed since the colony’s founding. Bordy puts in for a job at an Australian university, declining to include a photograph of himself in his application documents because he knows the country lacked diversity. He agrees to meet an Australian professor, who happens to be in London. Nervously he goes to meet the man, who turns out to be Chinese Australian.
Clarke’s parents, upon arrival in Australia, stay at Man Friday Hotel, named after a character from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Man Friday is “the Carib cannibal turned loyal servant” of Crusoe, and Clarke's parents are unnerved that the university booked them to stay at a hotel with such a name. At the grocery store, there is a cheese branded “COON.” Clarke’s mother wonders what kind of country this is. The couple settles in the seventies suburban “village” of Kellyville, buying a blonde brick house on Hectare Street. Their white neighbors are surprised by the couple’s elegance and eloquence. Gossip spreads, but Clarke and her little brother and older sister enjoy their idyllic childhoods. Near the milk bar where people go to pick up fish and chips and hamburgers, members of the nearby Exclusive Brethren fringe religious group proselytize, saying the Lord hears and sees all.
Clarke’s enjoyment of preschool is limited by Carlita Allen, a “ballsy” freckled white girl who makes her dislike of Clarke well known. On the first day, Carlita says, “You are brown.” She also calls her greedy and says the only reason she has lovely curly hair is because she is brown. After weeks of being bullied, Clarke confronts Carlita as she is being dropped off by her mother, calling Carlita a big bully who no one wants to play with. Mrs. Allen reprimands Clarke, calling her a very nasty little black girl. Anger burns in Clarke’s throat as Mrs. Allen forces her to apologize and to hold Carlita’s hand, walking her into the school. Clarke wonders if this is how her mother feels all the times she quietly waits while shopkeepers serve white customers before her.
In primary school, Clarke is accustomed to anti-brown racism. She learns that the more invisible she makes herself, the easier life will be. Still, she longs for acceptance and approval. In grade one, she is excited to be chosen as Student of the Week, which starts with her introducing herself before the class. The teacher, Mrs. Kingsley, accuses Clarke of inventing things when she shares that her parents’ professions are actress and mathematician. Mrs. Kingsley also insists on knowing where Clarke is from, surprised to learn she’s from Kellyville. She gets angry with Clarke for not knowing where her parents are “from,” simply saying England.
A student asks if people like Clarke have normal feelings, like normal people. Clarke says she doesn’t know. The students then have to take turns writing nice things about Clarke on a piece of paper that is passed around. Clarke sees the list, which mostly describes her as brown or black, or says that she isn’t Australian. The only nice words are from her best friend, Jennifer, who compliments her personality and talents. Clarke brings the sheet of paper to the bathroom, tearing Jennifer’s paragraph off to keep it, while tearing up the others. Jennifer’s words make her feel good.
When the Cabbage Patch Kids craze hits Australia, Clarke is envious to the point of tears when her big sister Cecilia receives a blond-haired, signed authentic doll from a friend for her birthday. After crying to her mother, Clarke is promised her own expensive doll for her birthday and Christmas combined. She waits for six months only to receive a brown-skinned doll, which disappoints her. She thinks of the doll as ugly. At school, Carlita teases her for the doll’s complexion, but other girls show interest in it and say it's like the ones they’ve seen on The Cosby Show.
Clarke comments that by the mid-1980s, her family would see more and more families of color in their area, the increased multiculturalism a legacy of the Gough Whitlam era of inclusivity. Campaigns by Indigenous Australians were also coming to fruition, with certain lands being returned to their traditional owners. Clarke watches the handover of Uluru (Ayers Rock) in the Northern Territory and is disbelieving when her mother explains that the black people on the TV are the original Australians.
Analysis
Although The Hate Race mainly covers Maxine Beneba Clarke’s childhood and adolescence in the 1980s and 1990s, her prologue is set in the present day. An adult with two young children, Clarke is walking in her new neighborhood in Melbourne, Australia to pick her son up from school when a stranger suddenly unleashes a barrage of racist abuse from the safety of his vehicle. With this startling anecdote, Clarke introduces the major theme of overt racism. She also shows how the trauma of the racism she endured as a young person still lives in her body, and incidences like this bring her right back to the “can’t-think freeze” feeling of powerlessness she experience on her first day of preschool.
The prologue also contains an instance of situational irony: the racist stranger demands that Clarke go back to the country she comes from, ignorant of the fact Clarke was born and raised in Australia. Clarke comments that members of the Black diaspora such as herself and her children have ancestors who were victims of the Atlantic slave trade. Because these ancestors were forcibly removed from their West African homeland four hundred years ago, Clarke suggests that her family’s connection to Africa is so slight that her spirit, upon death, would likely be denied access to Africa and sent to rest in a historically white-supremacist country where her Black minority status has always meant she stands out as different.
Having established the present-day frame for the memoir, Clarke recounts the events that led to her being born in Australia. As she details her father’s social mobility as the son of a Jamaican cane cutter who becomes a mathematics professor within a generation, Clarke focuses on the economic and political factors that brought so many Afro-Caribbean people to the UK. When the post-war economy was booming, immigration officers actively encouraged migration from the former colonies in the Caribbean to fill open jobs in Britain.
However, in response to a failing economy, the same political institutions that encouraged migration were soon taken over by anti-Black, anti-immigrant fearmongers such as Enoch Powell in the 1970s. In this way, British Afro-Caribbean people were treated with hostility by a public whose racism was tacitly encouraged by political leaders. To Clarke’s parents, the socially progressive government of Australian Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam seemed a safer alternative to a Tory-led Britain. But in another instance of situational irony, Clarke’s parents arrive in Australia to discover everyday racism is widespread, as captured in the Man Friday Hotel and Coon Cheese.
When Clarke is born into this everyday racist environment in 1979, she is unaware of her status as a Black minority until preschool begins. Following the lead of her racist mother, four-year-old Carlita Allen cannot help but repeatedly point out Clarke’s brown skin, implying that she is a lesser being because of her complexion. Everyday racism is also an issue for Clarke when it comes to interacting with teachers, such as Mrs. Kingsley, who condescendingly refuses to believe a Black girl could have parents with middle-class professions. Clarke shows how her childhood frustration with constantly being held out as different translates to internalized racism: When her Cabbage Patch Kid is brown-skinned, Clarke dismisses the doll as ugly because she isn’t white and blonde.
But despite the prevailing atmosphere of everyday, overt, institutional, and internalized racism in Clarke’s childhood, she sees signs of progress by the mid-1980s. A consequence of Whitlam’s inclusive policies and dismantling of the White Australia policy that kept non-white immigration numbers down, non-white families appear more often in Clarke’s neighborhood. Clarke also introduces the theme of Indigenous rights when recalling the time she sees the official return of traditional land to Indigenous Australians. In an instance of situational irony, Clarke learns that the dark-skinned people on the TV are the original inhabitants of Australia, and their ancestors had been living in the country for centuries before British colonization. To a young Clarke, there is a burgeoning sense of camaraderie with these other “black” Australias.
