Race and Culture

Race is an important element in the novel, and it is related to the idea of culture. The characters in the novel are black, and they live in a black community. There are two black cultures portrayed in the novel, though. The black culture of Flint is urban and lower-middle-class. The black culture of the South is poverty stricken and family oriented. The people in Flint, like Dad and Kenny's classmates, make fun of southern accents, southern ignorance, and poverty. This is a way of railing against the oppression of blacks in the South. The history of slavery and segregation results in a kind of self-hatred. Behind Dad's jokes about the South is a hatred of the racism that has created poverty and ignorance in the southern black community.

Even Joey feels the unfairness of racial inequality, though she's too young to fully understand it. Joey...