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Kipps and Belsey: Chapter 7
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in On Beauty, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Nature of Beauty
Politics in Academia
Race and Identity
The Value of Family
Summary
Analysis
It’s the Saturday of Howard and Kiki’s anniversary party. Levi makes sure to get a Saturday shift at the music mega-store where he works so that he can avoid all the preparation for the party, leaving Jerome and Zora in charge of it.
Once again, Levi tries to distance himself from his family. Notably, Levi is the only child in the family who seems to work a job—Zora and Jerome appear to be full-time college students. This further distances Levi from his academic family, aligning him more closely with working-class ideals.
Themes
As Levi walks back from his shift around four p.m., he listens to music on his headphones. All of a sudden, a thin older woman with unkempt hair (Carlene) stops him. She says he looks familiar and asks if he lives in the area. Levi finds her accent strange and amusing since it doesn’t resemble the typical “urban” accent that he associates with Black people.
While Levi’s “urban” lifestyle may make it difficult for Howard to understand him, Levi has his own blind spots. Levi gets his ideas about Blackness from hip-hop and American pop culture and latches onto them almost as accessories. However, his privileged lifestyle makes it difficult for him to relate to the narratives of struggle that hip-hop often portrays.
Themes
The woman (Carlene) says she’d like to see Levi’s mom, believing she must be glamorous. Levi says she’ll probably be disappointed since most of the time, Kiki seems more bored than glamorous. The woman says she also feels bored often. Levi invites the woman to the anniversary party, then says he has to go.
Kiki worries that white people don’t see her as beautiful, but even her own son Levi doesn’t see Kiki as beautiful. Levi’s claim that Kiki is bored, though oversimplified, perhaps hints at how out of place she feels in Howard’s academic world. That this woman—Carlene, Monty’s wife—says that she’s bored too suggests that she also feels left out of Monty’s academic realm.
Themes
