Racism and class in 1980s Britain — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Racism and class in 1980s Britain
Themes
What you need to know
How Pinnock explores racism, low-paid work and the British state, from Del's jobs and Enid's cleaning to the Home Office letter and Smithfield meat market 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: 'the lowest of the low', 'You're all dressed up and you look beautiful', 'matron tells you to clean it up', 'you get a mop and bucket and clean it up', 'If they won't treat him like a human being outside', 'no one care what he want to do to a black woman', 'Then them send a letter', 'So, we pay the fifty pound and now we nationality secure'.
Racism at work and in the street: Enid's humiliation at the hospital party, Del's sacking, the police vans, and the abuse that turned Del's father violent.
The British state: Brod's citizenship fee, the Home Office letter and the fear of deportation that the Windrush scandal later made real.
Class and poverty: cleaning jobs, long hours, a flat on an estate, and being poor and alone in London rather than poor together in Jamaica.
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.
