40 pages • 1 hour read
Christine Pride, Jo PiazzaWe Are Not Like Them
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Hair
One of the ways that race is most clearly navigated between Riley and Jenny is through their hair. Even when they see each other for the first time at the novel’s beginning, they both mention the other’s hair. Jenny’s long, shiny, smooth blonde hair is cut into a bob, and Riley is growing out her bangs. Jenny touches Riley’s hair, and Riley thinks that she is the only woman she would let do that. Hair, for the women, is a coded discussion of race. This is especially true when they are children: Their nicknames for each other are “Pony […] for my long blond ponytail I wore every single day in elementary school […] And Puff for Riley, for the trademark Afro puffs she wore atop her head from grade one through five” (33). Hair symbolizes the difference in race between the women and highlights that the racial tension in their relationship has not emerged since the shooting but rather grown. Like their hair, it has always been there.
Silence
Silence is a repeating motif in this novel for many characters. Riley struggles with silence about her own experience. As a Black woman, she has a specific experience walking through the world: “Even the same tired insults hurt—hate doesn’t have to be inspired to cut you. I was twelve the first time I was called the N-word” (98). Due to the hate she has received throughout her life, Riley is worried that the people she loves, specifically the white people—her best friend Jenny, and her ex-boyfriend Corey—will not understand her experience:
Exactly as Jenny called me out in the car at the hospital. It was easier not to give Corey the benefit of the doubt, not to trust that he would be able to understand, not to give him the chance to create an irreparable breech by saying the wrong thing if we tackled tricky subjects. That fear of being disappointed, or dismissed, was real—and crippling (286).
Due to this fear, she remains in silence, leaving her close relations in the dark about what she is going through and perpetuating the lie that race doesn’t have a real impact on her life.
Kevin must decide whether to stay silent about why he shot. He explains what happened with him and his partner. “I hear him yell, ‘Police, stop!’ and I’m there at his heels when he yells, ‘GUN!’ and fires. I stop and fire too and the guy goes down” (30). His own lawyer says, “So technically it was Cameron who shot the wrong guy. I mean you had no choice but to back him up […] Feels to me like this is our strategy” (75). Staying silent about what happened, by not testifying, would perpetuate the idea that the officers acted with “reasonable threat” and “followed […] training” (74-75). Ultimately, Kevin decides to take the deal and testify against his partner. To remain in the silence would perpetuate a narrative that was not true, and breaking the silence helps to bring truth and justice.
Jenny, meanwhile, thinks of the times that she has remained silent when racism presented itself:
It was the first but it wouldn’t be the last time someone would spit out the N-word or some other awful joke or comment over the years while I said nothing, the same shame rearing its ugly head, knowing I was betraying Riley with my silence (39-40).
Addressing this, and agreeing not to stay silent about race in their friendship is one of the ways the friends decide to move forward. Just like the protestor’s sign at Justin’s march, “WHITE SILENCE IS VIOLENCE” (169), Jenny remaining in silence hurts both her and Riley by not addressing the racism that Riley has experienced, even right in front of Jenny.
Grief
Grief is experienced in some form or another by everyone in the novel Whether justified or not, everyone experiences grief after the shooting of Justin Dwyer, whether it is grief over the loss of Justin himself, grief over the loss of another member of the Black community, or the grief that Kevin and his family experience as he faces jail time.
Like grief, the ending of this story does not have a clear resolution, which is why Tamara has the last say in the novel. For her, the grief will never end, but she will learn to live with it: “Some things can’t be justified. Still, the letter won’t bring peace or closure. Nothing will” (311). There is no resolution, for any of them, since all must learn to move through their grief and live with the consequences. Even as life moves forward, Riley moves forward in her career, and Kevin and Jenny move away, a boy is still dead, and that will affect them and their children’s lives to come. Furthermore, the killings of black men will continue—a recursive cycle of pain and grief seen when Tamara learns of the death of another Black boy: “The fervor and outrage is familiar, a well-oiled machine by now. She’s part of the inner circle, a club no one wants to be a member of, the moms bonded by grief” (310). The Epilogue reinforces grief as a motif—there is no end, there is just moving forward.
