How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
Only the white races endowed with creativity, he reflected. And yet I, blood member of same, must bump head to floor for these two. Think how it would have been had we won! Would have crushed them out of existence. No Japan today, and the U.S.A. gleaming great sole power in entire wide world.
He thought: I must read that Grasshopper book. Patriotic duty, from the sound of it. (7.88-9)
There's a weird cross-over in this book between race and nationality. (Like, where are the Japanese-Americans from before the war?) So here, Childan slips very easily between his racial prejudice (white people, yay) and something of a nationalist prejudice (patriotic duty for the USA, rah rah). Note also the split between Childan's feelings and his actions. He may not like the Japanese, but he'll work for them.
Quote #8
And this is the straight dope, right here. These people are not exactly human. They don the dress but they're like monkeys dolled up in the circus. They're clever and can learn, but that is all. (7.105)
Too angry to form complete sentence. This is the highest, purest form of racist prejudice in this book, we think: "These people are not exactly human." Once you start talking about people as inhuman or subhuman, it's pretty easy to start killing them. Here's our question: does Childan always hold to this idea or does he get shaken out of it?
Quote #9
These "natives" discerned, and noted in their table conversations and newspapers, that in the U.S.A. the color problem had by 1950 been solved. Whites and Negroes lived and worked and ate shoulder by shoulder, even in the Deep South; World War Two had ended discrimination. (10.92)
This is Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which explains that a triumphant U.S. would be racially cool after the war (as opposed to the British empire, which remains racially restrictive). And this is supposed to be by the 1950s! But if you were reading this book when it came out, you could look outside your window and see police using hoses and dogs against the Civil Rights Movement. How would that affect your reading?