Read the excerpt from Midsummer by Derek Walcott. Their thick skulls bled with rancor when the riot police and the skinheads exchanged quips you could trace to the Sonnets, or the Moor’s eclipse. Which factors most influence the speaker’s perspective?

The speaker connects a street confrontation involving riot police and skinheads with Shakespearean references to the Sonnets and Othello, whose central figure is the Moor. This shows that the speaker views the conflict through both racial identity and literary culture. The best choice is “race and culture.”

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