Drinking Coffee Elsewhere
Racism in Drinking Coffee Elsewhere In ZZ Packer’s book entitled Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, we get to see how African Americans cope with their different situations dealing with family, friendship, religion, and the pursuit of prosperity in the world. Within the short story collection there is a story named after the title, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, where we get to see the pressures put on a young African American woman, Dina, that causes her to resort to near complete isolation of herself. Dina says at one point, “We spent the winter and some of the spring in my room- never hers- missing tests, listening to music, looking out my window to comment on people who wouldn’t have given us a second thought”(Packer 140). Dina feels the need to resort to separating herself from everybody else because she has a difficult time dealing with all of the negative pressures put onto her from the outside world, even from other African Americans. There are various moments in which she gets disregarded and bullied such that she is forced into living in her state of misery. Packer depicts racism frequently in Drinking Coffee Elsewhere in order to illustrate the segregated, discriminatory, and negative pressures forced upon African Americans in society. First, Dina grew up under unfortunate circumstances that force her to become a product of her environment. When Dina tells her story to Dr. Raeburn, she recalls, “I couldn’t tell him the rest: that I had not wanted the boy to walk me home, that I didn’t want someone with such nice shoes to see where I lived”(133). Here, Dina recalls that she could not accept the help of a boy trying to do something nice for her due to the fact that she was too embarrassed for where she lived. It is cases like this that display how African Americans, like Dina, are inadvertently forced to act a certain way. For Dina, her situation at home is inescapable and it shapes her insecurity. Dina states in regard to her father, “My father was a dick and