The City We Became: Chapter 14 Summary & Analysis

Somewhat like Aislyn replicates the sexist, racist, and xenophobic thinking she learned from her emotionally abusive father, Brooklyn used to “pass[] . . . on” the sexist and homophobic abuse she suffered from men in the music industry. It was only due to her friends’ intervention that she changed her behavior. This pattern suggests that while Bronca may have been right to tell the Woman in White that abuse victims can rise against their abusers and change the world, victims will only make positive change if they learn to direct their anger at their abusers rather than at other victims. 

Bronca distinguishes between racism and racial prejudice because according to a common definition of racism, the perpetrator must occupy a position of greater racial privilege than the victim. Since Bronca is indigenous (Lenape) and Brooklyn is Black—both marginalized racial groups—Bronca believes that “the power dynamics are basically flat” between them, so they can’t “technically” be racist toward each other, though they can display racial prejudices. Bronca’s apology and her and Brooklyn’s willingness to be honest about why they’re “touchy” show that the two avatars are coming to accept each other and themselves as representatives of their shared community.     

The protest against “feminist liberal nonsense” and for the sentiment that “it’s okay to be a white man” comes directly after Bronca has alluded to the difference between racism and mere individual prejudices—where the difference is whether the racially prejudiced person occupies a position of racial power over their victim. No one occupies a position of racial power over white men in the U.S., so the novel is clearly mocking the protestors’ implicit claims of reverse racism. Bronca’s speculation that the police will tolerate white male protestors—but not counter-protestors—reminds readers that in the novel, the police are not true defenders of the city but rather parasites who enforce racist hierarchies. Her surprise that New York would be the site of a racist protest suggests that overt racism wanes in diverse urban areas where there are a sufficient number of residents willing to “knock[]” a racist “the fuck out on the subway.”  

The possibility that the Better New York Foundation could be backing an apparently spontaneous protest by racist New Yorkers underlines how global companies can use their money to manipulate local politics. That such racist New Yorkers existed to be manipulated, meanwhile, reminds the reader that the Woman in White is exploiting preexisting tensions in the New York community.

Starbucks, a global brand, is associated in the public imagination with gentrification—when a neighborhood is gentrifying, it gets a Starbucks. That tendrils have completely occupied the Starbucks franchises emphasizes that the tendrils represent how gentrification homogenizes cities and destroys their local cultures.

In the novel, cities draw power from the concepts associated with them. Starbucks is a global brand associated with “every … place” rather than a particular place; ergo, its homogenizing presence makes particular cities weaker rather than stronger. By contrast, “driv[ing] like a motherfucking New Yorker” is clearly a place-specific concept and practice; as such, it gives Bronca power—and protects her from the police, the false defenders of the city who might seek to stop its true defenders, the embodied boroughs.

That the tendrils literally create a body for the Woman in White suggests that they are physical extensions of her, as Brooklyn speculated they might be earlier in the novel. The identity between the tendrils and the Woman in White suggests in turn that she, as well as they, represents how outside forces can exploit divisions within a community to destroy it. The Woman’s comment that Hong’s assumptions “make an ass of u and me” displays the Woman’s odd, rather juvenile understanding of human popular culture. But it also displays an important truth: people’s assumptions and beliefs shape their perceptions, and so assumptions can blind people to objective reality. 

In this passage, the Woman in White is revealed to be a city. Since the Woman has previously stated that entities from her reality don’t build cities but created her to understand humanity, the reader can infer that these extradimensional entities built the city whose avatar the Woman in White is specifically to bring it to life so that it could combat human cities. This explains the Woman’s sadness that the entities from her reality find cities “monstrous”—her creators find her monstrous. It may also explain why they torture her; though they created her, they don’t respect the kind of life that she is. “R’lyeh” is the name of a lost city, occupied by an alien entity called Cthulhu, from H.P. Lovecraft’s 1928 short story “The Call of Cthulhu.” The allusion suggests that the extradimensional entities trying to destroy New York and humanity are the same entities Lovecraft mentions in his fiction.  

The Woman in White is loosely reenacting a famous scene from the 2001 film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring (1954), the first book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. In the scene, a wizard named Gandalf the Gray battles a demon called a Balrog. As a result of the battle, Gandalf dies and is resurrected as Gandalf the White. Gandalf is a hero while the Woman in White is a villain; the novel may be using her identification with him—on the basis of their shared association with the color white—to subtly critique the racial whiteness of the science-fiction/fantasy tradition. That the novel bothers to make such a critique suggests that art and art traditions shape people’s thinking and so it’s important to treat them thoughtfully. Meanwhile, the Woman in White’s refusal to let Hong and the other embodied boroughs speak to Aislyn suggests that she still isn’t sure of Aislyn’s loyalty and so needs to control the information and options available to Aislyn.