Then he felt it. The feeling of his Blackness rising to an almighty 10.0. He heard a boom like the child of thunder. He saw his own brain burst ahead of him. Hardy red confetti. His blood splashed all over the pavement and the couple. He saw the Finkelstein Five dancing around him...
-- Emmanuel (The Finkelstein 5)

Importance: At the end of the story, Emmanuel is shot dead by the police who arrive on the scene where the vigilante group is attacking the white couple. The author uses the Blackness scale to tie the end of the story to the beginning. When the story began, Emmanuel was moderating his voice when answering the phone, hoping for a non-threatening 1.5 on the scale. Now that he is a black man at the scene of a crime, the number rises to 10, the most threatening he could possibly be. After he is killed, the number, obviously, drops to 0. This passage...