Peter finally said, “This might sound callous, but honestly, whatever we do is going to be better than what he experienced before. Racism, be it systemic or overt, is often sustained through silence. Now we’ve quickly looked at what discrimination actually is, let’s move on to some of the things people can be discriminated against for. Part of what makes it hard for Deming to escape or address the widespread cultural biases in his community has to do with the fact that nobody wants to acknowledge them. Living in the predominantly white suburb of Ridgeborough as a Chinese-American teenager, Deming faces a number of microaggressions from his peers, educators, and even his adoptive parents. Treating his Chinese background as something that ought to be ironed out, Peter and Kay can’t fathom the idea that a person might be happy living a lifestyle that isn’t that of the stereotypical white American. When you’ve been let down so often by so many, it’d be hard not to resist. If we can put ourselves in other people’s shoes and start to understand things as they do, it will help them feel respected and valued in society. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. I liked that Europeans could come here to do jobs that I wouldn’t, and I liked that I could go to work in Europe, though I never would. Brilliant, eh? Living in the predominantly white suburb of Ridgeborough as a Chinese-American teenager, Deming faces a number of microaggressions from his peers, educators, and even his adoptive parents. Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts. Imagine being in there for an hour. If you add to this the belief (and, I have no doubt, reality in more than a few instances), people see others come in and their pay goes down, others come in and rents go up, others come in and social housing is given to them, others come in because the local factory only advertises over there, and on & on, a well of anger fills, fills, fills until it overflows. When Deming overhears them talking about whether or not he’ll be able to smoothly transition into a largely white school, Peter tells Kay that these kind of academic matters are “colorblind” “issues.” Although it might seem this way to Peter, this isn’t the case for Deming, who is in a very unique situation that has everything to do with race. Some white teachers feel uncomfortable discussing racism with their students because they feel ill-equipped to do so or fear accidentally offending someone and being outed as racist. Plot Summary. The Leavers shines a light on the ways in which people sometimes fail to hold themselves accountable for their own racial and cultural insensitivities. Pretty shameful that I’ll stand up to mindless slurs made by fools against people coming here looking for a better life, yet I’ve made similar slurs using similar phrases against my own countrymen who live, work and love in our country and just want a better life. I voted leave and that is the first thoughtful and considered response from a remainer that I have seen. “We want our country back” was ominous: redolent of Nazis blaming ‘the other’, it was a call to get rid of ‘them’ because ‘we’ don’t want ‘them’ on ‘our’ land. “[Polly], Chinese, the Bronx, Deming: they had never been enough.” In this moment, readers see that, although Peter and Kay truly want to help Deming, they have actually communicated a very destructive message—namely, that people who don’t adhere to stereotypical notions of American success are subpar and thus need to be “saved” from themselves. […] but they were different, had never noticed the way they looked to other people, because there were no other people present. Unfortunately for Deming, it’s hard to address these biases because the people perpetuating them don’t stop to examine their own prejudices. I saw the result and was ashamed of my country’s racism; now I’m ashamed that a bunch of posh Tories & UKIPpers understood the people I grew up with, live with and share a city with better than me. In turn, readers see just how seemingly inescapable racial and cultural prejudices are in Ridgeborough. When it was open, the foul smell of bins and rotting rubbish covered at least a square mile and, at points, made you physically sick. There are times when you need to take account of someone’s culture or set of beliefs, such as a specific Māori practice, that require you to be considerate and mindful of their custom. (including. They’re fat, or their parents don’t have a lot of money.”, “That’s true,” Kay said. ( Log Out / For a visual look at how the colonisation of Aotearoa New Zealand has had an effect on racial discrimination in particular, click on the TKI link below and download the text to the Te Tiriti o Waitangi comic. Oklahomans and Californians aren’t different racially or linguistically, yet managed to quickly create a picture of ‘them & us’ every bit as antagonistic and chasmal as any racial divide. The people doing the job are, mainly, Eastern Europeans, doing the job British people don’t want to do. This place runs 24hrs a day, 5.5 days a week. On camera: Alex, wearing a blue hoodie over a white T-shirt with a satchel-style bag slung over his left shoulder, walks through a university campus, passing a red brick building with a small garden along its front. “I was a bookworm with glasses. The argument was won… but only on TV political panel shows and in the pages of The Guardian. In modern Aotearoa New Zealand, racial discrimination, or racism, is grounded in our history of colonisation. After complaining and complaining and complaining, they put a roof on and it’s now, pretty much, air tight so the stink is usually kept inside. 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