Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of death by suicide and mass murder, which feature in the source text.

King uses Barbara and Dereese as an opportunity to talk about race, prejudice, and identity. Barbara is introduced as she is walking through Lowtown, a part of the city she has been told never to enter. The people of Lowtown denigrate her as “Blackish” because she “acts white,” which plays on Barbara’s inner conflict between who she is and who she is expected to be by different people in different contexts. Later, Barbara tells Holly that she sometimes experiences prejudice in her own life; she rarely dates, and she had popcorn thrown at her for going out with a white boy. She is worried because she is invited to some parties but not all of them, and people who didn’t know her have used racial slurs on occasion. King, however, creates ambiguity around which of Barbara’s negative experiences are the result of racism—only the latter instance is racially motivated with 100% certainty—but Barbara’s concerns reflect her internal struggle with trying to define the different parts of her identity and how to integrate them as she becomes an adult. Barbara already has a sense of race as a part of her identity—what gives Brady leverage to prey upon Barbara is the poignancy with which she feels that part of her identity and her developmentally and socially appropriate confusion about what parts of her identity are most salient in certain situations.