White Teeth focuses on the lives of Londoners of different ethnicities and class positions, with distinct cultural backgrounds and relationships to their British identities. The Bowdens and Iqbals are recent immigrants, while Archie Jones and the Chalfen family are more established Britons who benefit from their status as “authentic” white English nationals. In charting the microaggressions that many of its non-white characters face, the novel suggests that racism is deeply embedded in British culture. Although these pernicious racial divisions abounding in late 20th-century England will be challenging to dismantle, the novel provides some hope for a peaceful multicultural world through the younger generation of Londoners, who form positive relationships with each other.
Systemic racism greatly impacts the Iqbals’ lives, starting with Samad, who, though educated and accomplished—having fought for the British Army in World War II—is unable to find employment in London that is more advanced or lucrative than serving as a waiter in a curry house. The novel details instances of microaggressions that Samad experiences over several decades. Samad, the only non-white man in his World War II regiment, is treated with disrespect by his fellow Army officers. Years later, he is also treated like an outsider in London, where his children attend a middle-class school. In light of this treatment, Samad becomes confused and distressed, both attracted to aspects of Western society—evidenced by his affair with Poppy Burt-Jones, which he regards, guiltily, as a thoroughly Western vice—and opposed to them: for example, he is determined to expose his son Millat to a strict Islamic upbringing.
In addition to describing the way racism and racial divisions affect Samad, the novel defies the idea that several of its white characters, including Poppy Burt-Jones and Joyce Chalfen, uphold: that racial and cultural differences are easily approached, understood, and overcome. Both characters are presented as misguided and frequently offensive in their interactions with non-white people. Poppy, for instance, assumes that Samad is Indian—though he is from Bangladesh—and is attracted to him for the exoticism he seems to represent. Meanwhile, Joyce, determined to “nurture” others like plants, makes inaccurate, reductive assumptions about Irie, Millat, and Magid’s relationships with their parents, implying that “brown” people “don’t appreciate their children sufficiently.” By assuming that they understand others’ racial identities—that it is easy to bridge the gap between their own and others’ experiences of ethnic and cultural differences—Joyce and Poppy demonstrate a simplistic, unproductive, and harmful understanding of race. The novel shows Samad, Irie Jones, Millat, and Magid to be far more complicated and nuanced figures than Poppy and Joyce imagine them to be, suggesting that only individuals who live with a certain racial identity can understand the experience of this identity.
However, while the younger characters in the novels do not resolve or transcend racial conflicts, they provide an alternative, and markedly more positive, image of race relations. Unlike Samad, Irie does not choose to separate herself from society as a result of the racist incidents she has experienced (including being called racist slurs by her classmates). As a part of a second, younger generation of multicultural Londoners, she is accustomed to racial differences and the friction such differences can create. Her school, Glenard Oak, is filled with children of different cultures and ethnicities; though racism is present at Glenard Oak, Irie’s friendships with her peers, namely Millat, Magid, and Josh Chalfen, persist throughout the novel, unaffected by racial divisions. By the end of the novel, Irie, Millat, Magid, and Josh have formed a family of sorts—Irie and Josh are raising her daughter, who calls Millat and Magid (who may each be her father) “uncles”—suggesting their unity in the face of racial strife.
Even though racism and racial difference cause several characters, including Samad and Millat (who joins the extremist group KEVIN), to break off from society, becoming angry, resentful, and even violent, the novel also provides an image of peaceful cultural coexistence through the characters of Irie, Millat, Magid, and Josh. Though the novel argues that racial differences, and the devastating effects of racism, cannot be put aside easily, White Teeth also presents a tentatively optimistic view of racial and cultural exchange in modern society, considering the ways in which race and ethnicity impact individuals, creating distinct narratives for them, yet do not always drive these individuals apart.
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Race, Racism, and Multiculturalism ThemeTracker
Race, Racism, and Multiculturalism Quotes in White Teeth
Long, comfortable silences passed between them like those between women who have known each other for years. They looked out on to stars that lit up unknown country, but neither man clung particularly to home. In short, it was precisely the kind of friendship an Englishman makes on holiday, that he can make only on holiday. A friendship that crosses class and color, a friendship that takes as its basis physical proximity and survives because the Englishman assumes the physical proximity will not continue.
“Do you know who this man is, Jones?” Samad grabbed the doctor by the back of his hair and bent his neck over the back seat. “The Russians told me. He’s a scientist, like me—but what is his science? Choosing who shall be born and who shall not—breeding people as if they were so many chickens, destroying them if the specifications are not correct. He wants to control, to dictate the future. He wants a race of men, a race of indestructible men, that will survive the last days of this earth. But it cannot be done in a laboratory. It must be done, it can only be done, with faith! Only Allah saves! I am no religious man—I have never possessed the strength—but I am not fool enough to deny the truth!”
Magid really wanted to be in some other family. He wanted to own cats and not cockroaches, he wanted his mother to make the music of the cello, not the sound of the sewing machine; he wanted to have a trellis of flowers growing up one side of the house instead of the ever-growing pile of other people’s rubbish; he wanted a piano in the hallway in place of the broken door off cousin Kurshed’s car; he wanted to go on biking holidays to France, not day-trips to Blackpool to visit aunties; he wanted the floor of his room to be shiny wood, not the orange-and-green swirled carpet left over from the restaurant; he wanted his father to be a doctor, not a one-handed waiter; and this month Magid had converted all these desires into a wish to join in with the Harvest Festival like Mark Smith would.
O’Connell’s is the kind of place family men come to for a different kind of family. Unlike blood relations, it is necessary here to earn one’s position in the community; it takes years of devoted fucking around, time-wasting, lying-about, shooting the breeze, watching paint dry—far more dedication than men invest in the careless moment of procreation. You need to know the place. For example, there are reasons why O’Connell’s is an Irish poolroom run by Arabs with no pool tables. And there are reasons why the pustule-covered Mickey will cook you chips, egg, and beans, or egg, chips, and beans, or beans, chips, eggs, and mushrooms but not, under any circumstances, chips, beans, eggs, and bacon. But you need to hang around for that kind of information. We’ll get into that later. For now, suffice it to say this is Archie and Samad’s home from home; for ten years they have come here between six (the time Archie finishes work) and eight (the time Samad starts) to discuss everything from the meaning of Revelation to the prices of plumbers.
He knew that he, Millat, was a Paki no matter where he came from; that he smelled of curry; had no sexual identity; took other people’s jobs; or had no job and bummed off the state; or gave all the jobs to his relatives; that he could be a dentist or a shop-owner or a curry-shifter, but not a footballer or a film-maker; that he should go back to his own country; or stay here and earn his bloody keep; that he worshiped elephants and wore turbans; that no one who looked like Millat, or spoke like Millat, or felt like Millat, was ever on the news unless they had recently been murdered.
It worked like this: someone (whoever had actually bought a pack of fags) lights up. Someone shouts “halves.” At the halfway point the fag is passed over. As soon as it reaches the second person we hear “thirds,” then “saves” (which is half a third), then “butt!,” then, if the day is cold and the need for a fag overwhelming, “last toke!” But last toke is only for the desperate; it is beyond the perforation, beyond the brand name of the cigarette, beyond what could reasonably be described as the butt. Last toke is the yellowing fabric of the roach, containing the stuff that is less than tobacco, the stuff that collects in the lungs like a time bomb, destroys the immune system, and brings permanent, sniffling, nasal flu. The stuff that turns white teeth yellow.
All in all, then, the headmaster was wrong: Glenard could not be said to have passed on any great edifying beacon to future generations. A legacy is not something you can give or take by choice, and there are no certainties in the sticky business of inheritance. Much though it may have dismayed him, Glenard’s influence turned out to be personal, not professional or educational: it ran through people’s blood and the blood of their families; it ran through three generations of immigrants who could feel both abandoned and hungry even when in the bosom of their families in front of a mighty feast; and it even ran through Irie Jones of Jamaica’s Bowden clan, though she didn’t know it.
As the months flicked by. Ambrosia learned a lot of wonderful things from the handsome captain. He taught her how to read the trials of Job and study the warnings of Revelation, to swing a cricket bat, to sing “Jerusalem.” How to add up a column of numbers. How to decline a Latin noun. How to kiss a man’s ear until he wept like a child. But mostly he taught her that she was no longer a maidservant, that her education had elevated her, that in her heart she was a lady, though her daily chores remained unchanged. In here, in here, he liked to say, pointing to somewhere beneath her breastbone, the exact spot, in fact, where she routinely rested her broom. A maid no more. Ambrosia, a maid no more, he liked to say, enjoying the pun.
Worst of all was the anger inside [Millat]. Not the righteous anger of a man of God, but the seething, violent anger of a gangster, a juvenile delinquent, determined to prove himself, determined to run the clan, determined to beat the rest. And if the game was God, if the game was a fight against the West, against the presumptions of Western science, against his brother or Marcus Chalfen, he was determined to win it. Millat stubbed his fag out against the banister. It pissed him off that these were not pious thoughts. But they were in the right ball-park, weren’t they? He had the fundamentals, didn’t he? Clean living, praying (five times a day without fail), fasting, working for the cause, spreading the message?
Because Millat was here to finish it. To revenge it. To turn that history around. He liked to think he had a different attitude, a second-generation attitude. If Marcus Chalfen was going to write his name all over the world, Millat was going to write his BIGGER. There would be no misspelling his name in the history books. There’d be no forgetting the dates and times. Where Pande misfooted he would step sure. Where Pande chose A, Millat would choose B.
Archie, for one, watched the mouse. He watched it stand very still for a second with a smug look as if it expected nothing less. He watched it scurry away, over his hand. He watched it dash along the table, and through the hands of those who wished to pin it down. He watched it leap off the end and disappear through an air vent. Go on my son! thought Archie.
