How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
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)
This is one of those moments in White Teeth that is funny, but it's making a serious point. What does it mean that names and appearances no longer match? That we can't just make assumptions about people's ethnicities and personal histories? Could we ever do that, justifiably?
Quote #5
"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)
This is Mr. Hamilton speaking. He's the older man Irie, Magid, and Millat are assigned to bring food for their school's Harvest Festival. He's obsessed with teeth, and he's also flat-out racist. He thinks about people of different races very differently, but he also thinks about people as mammals—thus, in a more universal way. It's pretty hard to reconcile these two sides of Mr. Hamilton's stories.
Quote #6
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)
Captain Durham (an English captain in Jamaica who is Clara's grandfather and Hortense's father) expresses a thought very similar to Archie's: "not like the others" is very much like "not those kind of Indians," are we right?