What does Dog park represent?

The dog park represents the dehumanization of black people and of not having a place where one can fully belong. After leaving home, hiding in a motel, and being driven from that hotel by an angry racist mob, Claude and Janice are left with no choice but to seek refuge in a dilapidated dog park, where “flaking piles of dog shit hid under fallen leaves” and “a mangled squirrel was decomposing at the edge of a small pond” (239). The fact that this is their only hiding place demonstrates the extent to which their failure to belong has dehumanized them, leaving them alone with dead animals in a dog park.