Racism and xenophobia

Racism and xenophobia in the novel are not confined to political slogans: they surface in intimate encounters, street-level judgments, and the language through which people decide who belongs. Joe’s assault on a Senegalese French officer and Anne Elizabeth Trent’s reaction to immigrant neighborhoods in New York expose different expressions of racial hierarchy, while the people around them reveal how such assumptions can be challenged.

Racialized boundaries in public life

During the Armistice celebrations in St. Nazaire, Joe searches a crowded cabaret for Jeanette and finds her dancing with a Senegalese officer in a French uniform. Seeing the American flag draped over Jeanette’s dress, Joe pulls her away from the officer and strikes him. The officer does not fall or even visibly react beyond a puzzled smile; when others intervene, Joe hits Jeanette in the jaw and knocks her down, then lays out two French soldiers before a man smashes a bottle over his head. The episode turns the supposed end of war into a scene of racial possessiveness and physical disorder: Joe’s patriotic surroundings do not prevent him from treating the Black officer as an intruder, while the officer’s uniform and composure sit starkly against Joe’s violence.

The immigrant neighborhood as a test

Edwin Vinal takes Anne Elizabeth Trent from the skating rink to the settlement house where he teaches English, then leads her through the crowded streets nearby. Laundry hangs over the sidewalks; signs appear in Russian, Yiddish, Armenian, and Arabic; pushcarts, peddlers, restaurants, and phonographs fill the scene. Edwin also points out streetwalkers, drunks, a recruiter for a brothel, and boys he identifies as gunmen and drug peddlers. His tour makes the neighborhood a lesson in poverty and social conditions, but Anne reads its visible differences as evidence that its residents cannot belong. She says the foreigners should not be allowed into the country and asks how they can be made into citizens.

Edwin answers that the residents would be decent if they had a chance, and that birth into prosperous American families had given him and Anne an advantage. Anne rejects that explanation by marking the people she has seen as racially outside the nation. Her words expose how quickly a promise of civic inclusion gives way to a racial test of who counts as American. Edwin counters with a Christian argument, asking whether she has considered that Christ was Jewish. The exchange does not resolve their disagreement: Anne leaves insisting that she is right, while Edwin shakes his fist as the elevator carries her away. She throws him a kiss without meaning to, a small, involuntary gesture that sits beside their sharp political and moral conflict.

The tour continues after Anne gets home. Though she bathes and puts on perfume, she cannot sleep; the tenements’ crowded bodies, garbage, streetlights, and faces remain in her senses. In a nightmare, she walks with a gun in her handbag, tries to stop Joe Washburn and her father, and cannot draw the weapon as a bearded Jewish man approaches and embraces her. The dream repeats Edwin’s Christian challenge amid the clatter of the subway, turning her fear of the neighborhood into a trapped encounter with the argument she had refused. Its imagery does not simply confirm her prejudice: the gun she imagines carrying cannot protect her, and Edwin’s words persist within the nightmare. The episode connects xenophobic judgment to the social distance of a brief excursion, while showing that the encounter has unsettled Anne even though she has not consciously changed her position.

Race and the politics of labor conflict

After an afternoon trudging through slush, Anne Elizabeth Trent encounters Webb Cruthers at a railway station. He has pulled his cap low and muffler high, pretending not to know her because he fears that a detective might recognize him. Once aboard the overheated train, he asks what she thought of the mill scene. Anne calls the people there “all so yaller,” then says the only people who looked good to her were “those boys guardin’ the mills” because “they looked like white men.” Her response makes racial classification a measure of moral worth: she identifies with the white-looking guards rather than the workers, judging the conflict through the same hierarchy that had shaped her view of the immigrant neighborhood.

Anne’s racial judgment is joined to a rebuke of Webb’s conduct. She tells him, “you ran like a deer,” and he quietly asks whether he should have stayed and been arrested like Ben Compton. The exchange places the workers’ danger and Webb’s fear beside Anne’s approval of the guards; it offers no sign that her earlier encounter with Edwin Vinal has displaced her racial assumptions. Instead, her remarks show how exclusionary ideas persist across settings, shaping both her judgments of immigrant communities and her reading of labor conflict.

Narrative perspective and the persistence of exclusion

The episodes distinguish racial prejudice by its form without treating its effects as unrelated. Joe turns racialized possessiveness into immediate physical force; Anne Elizabeth Trent makes racial difference a test of civic belonging and, later, a way to judge which side in a labor confrontation deserves her approval. The contrast is not between a prejudiced man and an unprejudiced woman, but between violence enacted in a public celebration and assumptions carried into ordinary acts of evaluation. Anne’s nightmare registers that Edwin Vinal’s challenge has disturbed her, yet her later judgment of the mill scene shows no corresponding abandonment of racial hierarchy.

The narrative also makes the limits of recognition visible through its distribution of perspective. The Senegalese officer is not given an account of the confrontation in his own words; his puzzled expression is what Joe sees. In the neighborhood episode, Edwin identifies the people and conditions for Anne, whose own racial judgments then shape what she thinks the streets mean. These scenes do not ask the reader to accept the characters’ classifications as neutral descriptions. They show how quickly appearance becomes a verdict about character, citizenship, and worth—and how that verdict can survive even when other people offer grounds for questioning it.