Racial Labeling In The Drayton Hotel

themselves always unstable and ajar: race, she seems to be saying is a figure that can never be decoded once and for all, either on the body or through the signs and language that promise truth-content by classifying racial affect and effect” (779). This is affirmed through the characters ability to be ambiguous about their racial labeling. Clare and Irene find themselves able to pass through racially segregated spaces and different racial groups due to how others perceive them within those boundaries. This is illustrated when they are unquestioned when entering the Drayton Hotel, and more abundantly when they are surrounded by different racial groups but are able to meld with the culture represented by those groups.
Within the novel, the

primary focus is on the ability to take race and use it for one’s advantage within a specific set of boundaries, mainly set within space, but also used for advancement within social groups. The boundaries that are being challenged in the scope of race include racially segregated space and the ability to float from one race to the next without either detection or question. The prime indication of how this transcendence from one race to the next negatively occurs is by looking at how different races view this transgression. In Steve Pile’s essay on “Skin, Race, and Space”, he explains how passing is negative when it is people passing over from black to white: “Passing, as commonly understood, involves people who are legally defined as black fraudulently adopting white identities and inhabiting spaces marked out for white people: that is, in passing, people have crossed a ‘colour line’, a racial boundary, to assume a different racial identity” (26). Passing is found to be a negative occurrence when a person is shifting their identity from black to white and assumes the roles and accesses that one race has over the other. The main problem that this creates for people who are being deceived is that they cannot distinguish between the races when they have become able to pass, therefore they cannot hate what they cannot see.