White Teeth Race and Ethnicity Quotes

"Does anyone else have anything to say about these sonnets? Ms. Jones! Will you stop looking mournfully at the door! He's gone, all right? Unless you'd like to join him?"

"No, Mrs. Roody."

"All right, then. Have you anything to say about the sonnets?"

"Yes."

"What?"

"Is she black?"

"Is who black?"

"The dark lady."

"No, dear, she's dark. She's not black in the modern sense. There weren't any.. well, Afro-Carri-bee-yans in England at that time, dear. That's more a modern phenomenon, as I'm sure you know. But this was the 1600s. I mean I can't be sure, but it does seem terribly unlikely, unless she was a slave of some kind, and he's unlikely to have written a series of sonnets to a lord and then a slave, is he?" (11.51-60)

"Maureen, love. I'm going to be a father!"

"Are you, love? Oh, I am pleased. Girl or—"

"Too early to tell as yet. Blue eyes, though!" said Archie, for whom these eyes had passed from rare genetic possibility to solid fact. "Would you credit it!"

"Did you say blue eyes, Archie, love?" said Maureen, speaking slowly so she might find a way to phrase it. "I'm not bein' funny... but in't your wife, well, colored?" (4.21-24)

Kelvin prepared to cut to the chase. "That company dinner last month—it was awkward, Archie, it was unpleasant. And now there's this annual do coming up with our sister company from Sunderland, about thirty of us, nothing fancy, you know, a curry, a lager, and a bit of a boogie... as I say, it's not that I'm a racialist, Archie..."

"A racialist..."

"I'd spit on that Enoch Powell.. but then again he does have a point, doesn't he? There comes a point, a saturation point, and people begin to feel a bit uncomfortable... You see, all he was saying—" (4.60-62)