79 pages • 2 hours read
Blended
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Themes
The Persistence of Racism
At the core of Blended as a coming-of-age story is Izzy’s growing perception of the wide implications of racism in contemporary America. As Izzy mentions often in the opening pages, she is olive-skinned, neither Black nor white, able to pass as either, seeing her life as a kind of fancy cookie, part chocolate and part vanilla. That relatively harmless sense of her blended racial identity has kept Izzy from acknowledging the hard reality of racism.
That awareness begins with the snarky, insensitive comment she overhears in class from a white kid about the harmlessness of lynching and the subsequent discovery of the noose in her friend’s gym locker. Because Izzy has been raised to carefully balance her white and Black identities, the reality of such ugly racism is new to her. She feels suddenly vulnerable, embarrassed to be white, wanting to be Black. She is torn between which race she is even as she comes to understand that her Black identity subjects her to menacing perceptions and threats of white America. Her father stresses that Black people are constantly being evaluated by white people. In the class discussion, Izzy’s teacher points out that the history of racism in America is hardly a finished narrative and that, that although perceptions in America are vastly better than they were a scant 50 years ago, the work of embracing America’s diversity is far from over. John Mark’s tearful acknowledgement that he was raised within a white racist home and his declaration that such thinking does not define him underscores to Izzy the reality of racism.
The tipping point comes when Izzy and Imani are confronted in the dress shop by a security guard who assumes two Black teenagers in a high-end shop are automatically a “threat” to the store. Izzy’s education into the reality of racism is completed when she and her brother, innocently driving away from an ice cream store, are pulled over by white cops, accused of robbing a bank, and subjected to the humiliation of being detained and handcuffed. Ultimately Izzy is shot by one of the cops. The accusation is outrageous but underscores the illogic of racial profiling. In the end, the only solution the novel offers to the persistence of racism in America is the gift of awareness. Izzy comes to see the dimensions of the problem, and she allows the metaphor of the piano music she loves to suggest that Black and white antagonism can give way to harmony.
The Power of Music
Izzy’s precocious talent at the piano is at once creative and therapeutic: “It would be nice,” she admits in the first chapter, “if the rest of my life came together like some kind of magical musical symphony” (2). In her long hours of dedicated practice, Izzy finds escape from the difficult adjustment to her parents’ often contentious custody spats. When she is at the keyboard, whether at her father’s massive Steinway or her mother’s modest Casio electronic keyboard, whether toiling through the “upstairs-downstairs” tedium of scales or working through her Baroque sonatina, music gifts her with a world that makes sense, one of striking harmonies and cooperative rhythms.
The novel begins with a brief chapter in which Izzy riffs on her concept of the piano and its sounds. Her “thirsty fingers” work hard to find the right melodies and harmonies. However, music offers more than a respite from the disharmony of her family life: Music offers Izzy a sense of the possibility of cooperation and of different elements working together: “Two keys make a different sound than three played together. Four or five mashed at the same time is even better” (2). In music, Izzy grasps the power of community—the combinations of black and white keys—that together create something beautiful. It is a revelation to Izzy.
Of course, Izzy is only 11. The idea of music and harmony being applied to the complexities of people might seem naïve. Given her class discussion of the long and dark history of racism in America and given the pressing evidence of racism that Izzy herself experiences, the idea of everyone getting along and finding a way to harmony might seem so callow that it must be ironic. The novel, however, reveals that harmony is possible. It chronicles Izzy’s difficult maturation into realizing that this concept of harmony can work for people. Music has the power to bring radically different types of people together. Izzy talks about how at the fast-approaching recital all the parents, hers included, will set aside their day-to-day pettiness and enjoy the music. The closing scene at the hospital, when both sides of Izzy’s expanding family come together in a tight embrace, embodies the idea of harmony suggested by the power of music.
The Dynamics of Family
Izzy is a child of divorce. Although her parents reassure her of their love for her even as they decide they cannot continue their marriage, Izzy struggles to understand the trauma of her family’s dissolution. Her family, she says, was “shattered.” She states, “At first the word ‘divorce’ scared me. It was like our family had come down with some horrible, incurable disease or something” (14). She feels helpless, panicky, and vulnerable. Change terrifies her. She reveals the frustration over the ground rules of her parents’ complicated week-on-week-off custody agreement. At 11, she struggles with defining a home. When both her parents decide within weeks of each other to complicate Izzy’s conception of family life even more by their decisions to remarry, Izzy initially wrestles with what has happened to her family, that reassuring unit of mother/father/child that she knew for years. She compares her family to a pitcher shattered into a dozen pieces. A family for Izzy lacks any dynamics. Family is a frozen and reliable unit that, once altered, is forever lost.
Blended does not idealize family, nor does it sugarcoat the impact of divorce on kids. Like Mr. Kazilly’s social studies/English class, author Sharon Draper, herself a career teacher, uses Blended as an opportunity to explore important contemporary social issues as a way to help its young adult readers cope with real-world concerns. What Izzy learns in the end is that families do not divide, they multiply. In the end, Izzy, like all children placed within difficult emotional circumstances, must look beyond the panic and helplessness. In turn, over the months leading up to the recital, Izzy comes to terms with the new people in her family life. She sees the simple, unaffected humanity of John Mark, the proud Black identity of Anastasia, and the emotional support of Darren. Her family expands. It evolves. In the closing scene in the hospital, Izzy accepts her new family and its complicated dynamic. Like her family, Izzy herself as grown.
The Implications of Biracial Identity
In the 21st century, Black Lives Matter era of progressive activism that seeks to address America’s systemic racism (Black Lives Matter contacts Izzy after the shooting), Izzy must come to terms with her complicated biracial identity. For all the reassuring metaphors she finds for Black and white cooperation and the possibility of blending, from the chocolate chip cookie dough she makes to the piano keyboard, she comes to understand the implications of her biracial identity in a country that still sees in terms of Black and white. Her olive skin, her tangled hair, and her freckles all define her as neither rather than both. As she shuttles between her parents’ homes, she feels progressively uneasy over which race she is and how race defines, shapes, or distorts her identity. She feels estranged from her Black identity when she sees the African decorations in Imani’s home. She feels estranged from her white identity when the noose is discovered in the gym locker. She feels white when she plays Clementi; she feels Black when she plays “Bumble Boogie.” A loving home is not enough. Her father long ago assured her that when he married her mother, he never regarded her as white: “When your mom and I first met, we simply fell in love. We didn’t see color—she saw me, I saw her” (13).
In the classroom, when the discussion turns to lynching, in the dress shop when she is put under the scrutiny of a security guard, and in the confrontation with the white cop on the way to the recital, Izzy begins to understand the darker implications of biracial identity. Even as she discovers the crazy syncopations of so-called Black music and feels shame over the legacy of white bigotry, she comes to understand that biracial identity is not simply about chocolate chip cookie dough or the sharps and flats on a keyboard. She does not have to decide one or the other. She does not have to feel divided and contested. In the end, despite a culture that still resists the implications of biracial identity, as testified by the racial profiling in the aftermath of the bank robbery in which Izzy is shot, Izzy embraces her bothness. She understands that race defines but does not limit her. She sees that being biracial expands her possibilities and opens her horizons.
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