How we cite our quotes: The main text of the story is cited (Chapter.Paragraph). The date headers are not counted as paragraphs. The verses in the chapters with a single passage from the narrator's religious texts are cited (Chapter.Verse.Line#). In chapters with multiple passages, the verses are cited (Chapter.Verse#.Line#). The four section pages with the years and passages are cited (Year.Verse).
Quote #4
Zahra grunted. "Mixed couples catch hell whether people think they're gay or straight. Harry'll piss off all the blacks and you'll piss off all the whites. Good luck." [...]
"We can be a black couple and their white friend." (15.55-58)
Once again, interracial romantic relationships are bothering people despite it being 2027—the discrimination is even so bad that Zahra fears it'll lead to them getting assaulted or killed. So Lauren comes up with a scheme: they'll travel in disguise, as a Black couple, with Lauren masquerading as a male who's Zahra's boyfriend. And they'll be traveling with a white friend, Harry Balter. What are the downsides of this scheme, if any? Does it work at all?
Quote #5
But I've never walked a freeway before today. I found the experience both fascinating and frightening. In some ways, the scene reminded me of an old film I saw once of a street in mid-twentieth-century China—walkers, bicyclers, people carrying, pulling, pushing loads of all kinds. But the freeway crowd is a heterogeneous mass—black and white, Asian and Latin, whole families are on the move with babies on backs or perched atop loads in carts, wagons or bicycle baskets, sometimes along with an old or handicapped person. Other old, ill, or handicapped people hobbled along as best they could with the help of sticks or fitter companions. Many were armed with sheathed knives, rifles, and, of course, visible, holstered handguns. The occasional passing cop paid no attention. (15.100)
What Lauren describes here is basically a stream of refugees fleeing destroyed areas in hopes of better lives elsewhere. When push comes to shove, all the boundaries that used to separate people seem to fall apart to some extent, and everyone's now part of the streaming heterogeneous mass: a bunch of people of whatever skin colors, black and white, Asian and Latin, etc.
Quote #6
"All of a sudden you're a Good Samaritan," Harry said. But he didn't mind. There was no disapproval in his voice.
"It was the baby, wasn't it?" Zahra asked.
"Yes," I admitted. "The family, really. All of them together." All of them together. They had been a black man, a Hispanic-looking woman, and a baby who managed to look a little like both of them. In a few more years, a lot of the families back in the neighborhood would have looked like that. hell, Harry and Zahra were working on starting a family like that. And as Zahra had once observed, mixed couple catch hell out here. (17.57-59)
While migrating north with Lauren, Harry and Zahra remark on our narrator's shift toward being more welcoming to strangers. In this case, that fact that the strangers were racially mixed was a big factor in why Lauren chose to help them. Often, empathy and compassion spring up when we see something of ourselves in the other person. People not of the dominant race usually have to work harder to survive, and perhaps that explains why Lauren cares about these strangers more.