Racial Tension

Examination of race in American culture is one of the central concerns of the narrative. One of the main facets of race that the novel explores is the entrenched nature of racial tension that seems to ubiquitously define American culture. This idea is evoked from the very first sentence of the novel: “I am the white boy at the Martin Luther King Middle” (2). David Greenfeld is one of very few white students in a predominantly black public middle school, and the mere fact of this seems to spark racial tension in David’s daily experience at school. David is often teased and bullied at school, explicitly due to the fact that, in that environment, he is a racial minority. This tension mirrors the fact that racial minorities in America—such as black and Hispanic people—experience much more large-scale forms of oppression.

The novel also...