Racism and prejudice — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Racism and prejudice
Themes
What you need to know
How Syal explores racism and prejudice in their many forms, from ignorance and casual insults to Sam's public hatred and violence, and their cost to victims and perpetrators alike across the text, and why it matters to the text's meaning.
Where it appears, the key quotations that show it, and different ways it can be interpreted.
Evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the text.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'brown or black face', 'the poor children in Africa', 'hissed comments', 'charity parcels', 'with his bloody rivers', 'all the others', 'real live bomb', 'Yow'll catch summat'.
The many forms of racism: ignorance, names and jokes, a stranger's insult, Powell's politics and Sam's violence, and the physical shock Meena feels at each.
Prejudice beyond race: the village's distrust of the fair's travelling families, with whom Meena feels a kinship.
Context: Enoch Powell's 1968 speech, which Papa and the uncles defy, and the Race Relations Acts of 1965 and 1968.
OCR's 2022 question on prejudice and the moments its mark scheme suggests, from the Kumars' arrival in Tollington to Sam on television.
Quotations are short phrases of a few words, the way you would learn them for a closed-book exam.
OCR's question on this text has two parts on the same text. Part (a), 20 marks, compares a printed extract from it with an unseen extract of the same genre, and weights your response (AO1) and context (AO3) twice as heavily as language analysis (AO2), where context means the social and cultural situations you can infer from the two extracts and their introductions; an answer on only one of the two extracts cannot go above Level 3. Part (b), 20 marks, explores another moment in the same text from memory, with response and analysis of language, form and structure (AO1 and AO2) equally weighted and no marks for context. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the part it is for.
