How we cite our quotes: (Chapter. Paragraph)
Quote #1
She stuck out her brown hand, he met it with a white one, just like that damn button her mother always kept in the bottom of her bead box, SCNN or SNCC or something she'd belonged to way back in the middle of the last century, the Black hand and the White hand joined together. Christ! (4.65)
Heather got it right the second time. The SNCC, or Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was an organization that arose during the Civil Rights Movement. Its logo was a black person and a white person shaking hands. The organization participated in the civil rights sit-ins, freedom rides, and even the March on Washington. Heather's mom was part of all this, so it's no surprise that racial issues are important for Heather.
Quote #2
They were still massacring whites in Johannesburg, Orr noticed on a headline at a corner newspaper stand. Years now since the Uprising, and there were still whites to massacre in South Africa! People are tough.... (6.49)
The South African government from 1948 to 1994 enforced a system of racial segregation called apartheid, which means "apartness" in Afrikaans, one of the country's official languages. Obviously, the end of apartheid was nowhere in sight for people during the time this novel was written, so in George's future, Le Guin imagines the end of apartheid as an event called the Uprising. That leads to the violent massacre of white people in retaliation for the frequent massacres of black people in South Africa under the apartheid system. This is something that many white South Africans were worried about, and something that some conspiracy theorists still assume will happen eventually.
Quote #3
"No." She cleaned out the tuna can scrupulously and licked the knife. "Portland. Twice, now. Two different hospitals. Christ! But born and bred. So were my parents. My father was black and my mother was white. It's kind of interesting. He was a real militant Black Power type, back in the seventies, you know, and she was a hippie. He was from a welfare family in Albina, no father, and she was a corporation lawyer's daughter from Portland Heights. And a dropout, and went on drugs, and all that stuff they used to do then. And they met at some political rally, demonstrating. That was when demonstrations were still legal. And they got married. But he couldn't stick it very long, I mean the whole situation, not just the marriage. When I was eight he went off to Africa. To Ghana, I think. He thought his people came originally from there, but he didn't really know. (7.123)
Heather's dad is kind of a stereotype of a black male who would have been involved in the Civil Rights and Back to Africa Movements. He's poor, he's a deadbeat dad, and he's kind of idealistic about the idea of Africa as his homeland. We get this huge paragraph about Heather's parents, but we never learn anything about George's parents. Why is that?