White Teeth Race and Ethnicity Quotes

"You said the Iqbals are comin' to dinner. I was just thinkin'... if they're going to want me to cook dem some curry—I mean, I can cook curry—but it's my type of curry."

"For God's sake, they're not those kind of Indians," said Archie irritably, offended at the suggestion. "Sam'll have a Sunday roast like the next man. He serves Indian food all the time, he doesn't want to eat it too." (3.57-58)

The woman took pity, swallowed her gum, and looked Irie up and down; she felt more sympathetic as she noted Irie's cocoa complexion, the light eyes.

"Jackie."

"Irie."

"Pale, sir! Freckles an' every ting. You Mexican?"

"No."

"Arab?"

"Half Jamaican. Half English."

"Half-caste," Jackie explained patiently. "Your mum white?"

"Dad."

Jackie wrinkled her nose. "Usually de udder way roun." (11.74-83)

Alsana took out baltic-brain, number three of their twenty-four-volume-set Reader's Digest Encyclopedia, and read from the relevant section:

The vast majority of Bangladesh's inhabitants are Bengalis, who are largely descended from Indo-Aryans who began to migrate into the country from the west thousands of years ago and who mixed within Bengal with indigenous groups of various racial stocks. Ethnic minorities include the Chakma and Mogh, Mongoloid peoples who live in the Chittagong Hill Tracts District; the Santal, mainly descended from migrants from present-day India; and the Biharis, non-Bengali Muslims who migrated from India after the partition.

"Oi, mister! Indo-Aryans... it looks like I am Western after all! Maybe I should listen to Tina Turner, wear the itsy-bitsy leather skirts. Pah. It just goes to show," said Alsana, revealing her English tongue, "you go back and back and back and it's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe. Do you think anybody is English? Really English? It's a fairy tale!" (9.227-229)

This has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow, and white. This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment. It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fishpond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O'Rourke bouncing a basketball, and Irie Jones humming a tune. Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checkups. It is only this late in the day, and possibly only in Willesden, that you can find best friends Sita and Sharon, constantly mistaken for each other because Sita is white (her mother liked the name) and Sharon is Pakistani (her mother thought it best—less trouble). (12.107)

"But like all things, the business has two sides. Clean white teeth are not always wise, now are they? Par exemplum: when I was in the Congo, the only way I could identify the n***** was by the whiteness of his teeth, if you see what I mean. Horrid business. Dark as buggery, it was. And they died because of it, you see? Poor bastards. Or rather I survived, to look at it in another way, do you see?" (7.113)

There he asked him to make an exception for Ambrosia ———, an "educated Negress" he wished to marry. She was not like the others. She must have a place with him on the next outgoing ship. But if you are to rule a land that is not yours, you get used to ignoring exceptions; Swettenham told him frankly there were no spaces on his boats for black whores or livestock. (13.26-27)

"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)

In Glenard Oak Comprehensive, black, Pakistani, Greek, Irish—these were races. But those with sex appeal lapped the other runners. They were a species all of their own. (11.26)