Though discussed briefly, Beatty does talk about how blackness is measured in Dickens. His sentiment, which is as follows, “everyone in Dickens, regardless of race, was black and you determined someone’s degree of blackness not by skin color but by whether they said “For all intents and purposes” or “For all intensive purposes” (164),” is contextually based after Sheila Clark accused a white boy of stealing on her “balls.” Beatty points out the “white” boy is actually latino. This got me thinking about how race is used in the novel. As noted with Charisma, she believes she is black and must be reminded when her mom comes to town of her Mexican heritage. What does it mean to be black? What does it mean to be white? Are these constructions fluid or fixed? Can a black person be white? and a white black? Is Beatty’s comment about who is black relevant and applicable in Bowdoin’s community and on a larger scale, American society? How does this hinder us from seeing other as equally relevant?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Though discussed briefly, Beatty does talk about how blackness is measured in Dickens. His sentiment, which is as follows, “everyone in Dickens, regardless of race, was black and you determined someone’s degree of blackness not by skin color but by whether they said “For all intents and purposes” or “For all intensive purposes” (164),” is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":404,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-paul-beatty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-1038-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-1038-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-1038-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-1038-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/404"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-1038-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-1038-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-1038-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-1038-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-1038-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}