Intersectionality, Identity, and Discrimination Theme Analysis

Piecing Me Together follows high school student Jade throughout her junior year. Jade is an anomaly in her neighborhood, but the pride of it: rather than attend the neighborhood’s public high school, she buses to a private school called St. Francis, where she attends on a scholarship. At St. Francis, however, Jade is also an anomaly—she’s one of only a handful of black students, in addition to being poor and overweight. As Jade navigates her neighborhood, school, and a mentorship program called Woman to Woman that seeks to elevate black girls like Jade through sometimes questionable means, she has to constantly figure out how to navigate the intersections of her many identities—and indeed, the varied and overlapping identities of her friends and mentors. Through this, Piecing Me Together makes it clear that it’s impossible to boil down a person’s identity to a single defining characteristic, or even a handful of characteristics. People identify in myriad ways, which means not only that they contain multitudes—it also means that people whose identities are marginalized, like Jade, can experience discrimination for a variety of different but connected reasons.

Piecing Me Together makes it clear that it’s universally offensive—and even dangerous—to look at someone and see only their various identity markers. Jade introduces herself by talking about her dreams and wants to do most: learn Spanish, which will give her the opportunity to get out of Portland and help others by going on the school’s yearly service learning trip. Though Jade is forthcoming about being black and poor, she also makes sure that the reader is aware that she’s proud of her roles beyond these markers: daughter, niece, and scholar. Jade’s pride in who she is and what she can do contrasts greatly with her guidance counselor, Mrs. Parker’s, reasoning behind nominating Jade for the Woman to Woman mentorship program. Awkwardly and uncomfortably, Mrs. Parker says she nominated Jade because “young people with [her] set of circumstances are, well, at risk for certain things.” That is, Mrs. Parker distills Jade down to the circumstances and parts of her that, statistically speaking, are going to make her life more difficult (such as being poor, black, and female), rather than looking at Jade as a whole person who is already on a path to success despite her difficult circumstances.

Though this kind of discrimination is emotionally taxing for Jade, she and her black friends are aware that because they’re black, female, and poor, they’re not just at risk of having well-meaning white people talk down to them—they’re also at risk of experiencing police brutality. This becomes especially clear to them when they hear that police officers broke the jaw of Natasha Ramsey, a young black girl from across the river—supposedly for resisting arrest and talking back when the officers showed up at a house party. Jade and her best friend, Lee Lee, are well aware that what happened to Natasha could easily happen to them or their loved ones, simply because of their sex and the color of their skin.

Jade also pays close attention to the ways in which her various identity markers either allow her to connect with her classmates or make her feel as though she lives worlds away from them. To illustrate how poverty alienates her from her classmates, Jade recounts a time when one of her teachers asked the class to think about “invisible people” in their communities, and one white classmate mentioned her housekeeper. Jade shares that she looked to the one other black student in the class, Kennedy, hoping that they could bond over what seemed like the speaker’s ridiculous wealth, but Kennedy instead accused the girl of stealing her answer. Because Kennedy is in such a wildly different income bracket from Jade, the two are never able to connect over being black. This works in the opposite direction when Jade befriends Sam, a white girl who also rides the bus to school. Like Jade, Sam is extremely poor and attends St. Francis on a scholarship. The girls bond quickly over the many things this means that they share, such as busing in from neighborhoods that their classmates refer to as “depressing” or “ghettos” and having to navigate the school cafeteria every day for their free lunches.

Of course, this isn’t to say that the girls don’t experience major differences in how others treat them due to their skin color. Their Spanish teacher, Mr. Flores, nominates Sam to go on the service learning trip to Costa Rica over spring break, something that Jade has worked toward since she was a freshman—while Jade, as part of the Woman to Woman program, sits through questionably useful seminars about “loving yourself,” dating, and how to host a “girls’ night” with vegan-friendly snacks. Jade recognizes that because Sam is white, her teachers see her as deserving of opportunities like going to Costa Rica, while Jade, because she’s black, is offered opportunities that seek to (in theory) bring her up to the level of her white peers. However, given Jade’s hard work and academic ability, her teachers are actually diminishing her talents and patronizing her rather than truly helping her. Since Jade tutors most of the classmates who go on the trip, she understands that she’s not passed over because she’s not a good enough student: rather, it’s because her teachers see her merely as a poor black girl who should be treated differently than her white peers.

Though the novel offers no real remedies for the discrimination Jade experiences, it does suggest that it’s important to talk about how people’s intersecting identities color how they see the world and how the world sees them. By telling Jade’s story, the novel humanizes marginalized people like Jade, simply by showing that she is so much more than just poor and black—she’s a multifaceted human being deserving of respect and kindness.