Arnetta is the leader of Laurel’s brownie troop. She is hostile and seen as a bully. No one would dare stand up to her bossy personality. She’s the one who claims a girl from Troop 909 called Daphne a derogatory racial slur. When telling the rest of the troop about the name calling, Arnetta asks Daphne if she’d heard it too. The first time Daphne doesn’t give an answer so Arnetta nudges her. Daphne then shrugs once asked again, but after Arnetta gives her a hard look and she changes her answer and nods. “Daphne shrugs her shoulders at first, then slowly nods her head once Arnetta gives her a hard look” (Packer 7). Arnetta also puts Laurel in a difficult situation. In the story Arnetta had just told the troop about the secret meeting they’d have to discuss what they were going to do to Troop 909. Arnetta then turns all attention to Laurel rudely asking “Snot, you’re not going to bitch and tell Mrs. Margolin, are you?” (Packer 10). Laurel tries to voice that maybe Arnetta didn’t hear the girls correctly. She doesn’t want to do anything to the girls when there’s no true evidence that the slur was said. Arnetta cuts her off before she is finished asking her if she was going to tell or not. Laurel fell into peer pressure and said yes as her whole troop stared at her. “The rest of our Brownie troop looked at me as though they’d already decided their course of action, me being the only impediment” (Packer 10). Laurel says yes but she …show more content…
This lead too many difficult times in Laurel’s group. All of the girls were influenced by one member in the group, in this case Arnetta. She was the person that planned the whole attack on Troop 909 even though many of the girls wanted nothing to do with it. A second theme that was portrayed in Brownies is racial segregation. This was seen from the beginning when Laurel stated that her town was full of African Americans with only one boy named Dennis being Caucasian in her whole school. From this we can infer that the rest of the troop were raised without knowing many things about white people. This is how both of these themes were incorporated into the