If the unborn child had been born, the status quo – represented in the silent, repressed, and racist lives that those in the trailer park lead – would change forever. Silence would have been impossible given the mixed-race child; one can even conjecture how the characters that Banks mentions at the beginning of the story could break free from repression and come alive to talk at length about the presence of the mixed race child. In Betsy Erkkila’s “Blood, Sex, and Other American Crosses”, the author writes the following about blood, saying that it was “a national fetish, a means of affirming political community, kinship, citizenship, and union at the same time that it became the grounds for exclusion, expulsion, negation, and extermination” (7). Though Erkkila is describing the fetishization of blood in the period of time following the Revolutionary In Betsy Erkkila’s “Blood, Sex, and Other American Crosses”, the author writes the following about blood, saying that it was “a national fetish, a means of affirming political community, kinship, citizenship, and union at the same time that it became the grounds for exclusion, expulsion, negation, and extermination” (7). Though Erkkila is describing the fetishization of blood in the period of time following the Revolutionary War, the fact that mixed blood could be
If the unborn child had been born, the status quo – represented in the silent, repressed, and racist lives that those in the trailer park lead – would change forever. Silence would have been impossible given the mixed-race child; one can even conjecture how the characters that Banks mentions at the beginning of the story could break free from repression and come alive to talk at length about the presence of the mixed race child. In Betsy Erkkila’s “Blood, Sex, and Other American Crosses”, the author writes the following about blood, saying that it was “a national fetish, a means of affirming political community, kinship, citizenship, and union at the same time that it became the grounds for exclusion, expulsion, negation, and extermination” (7). Though Erkkila is describing the fetishization of blood in the period of time following the Revolutionary In Betsy Erkkila’s “Blood, Sex, and Other American Crosses”, the author writes the following about blood, saying that it was “a national fetish, a means of affirming political community, kinship, citizenship, and union at the same time that it became the grounds for exclusion, expulsion, negation, and extermination” (7). Though Erkkila is describing the fetishization of blood in the period of time following the Revolutionary War, the fact that mixed blood could be