Race and Class Theme Analysis

The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963 spotlights Kenny and Byron’s growing awareness of the ways in which race and social class impact people’s lives—including their own. Their family doesn’t have a lot of money, but the Watsons are still better off than other people in their community. For instance, Kenny learns to share his lunch with Rufus, who never has anything to eat at school. Kenny also notices that the school bully, Larry Dunn, wears light clothing on the coldest winter day—a realization that emphasizes Kenny’s growing understanding that not everybody comes from the same background or has the same privileges. He has a similar realization when his family travels to Birmingham, Alabama. Because their community in Flint is mostly made up of other Black families, Kenny and Byron don’t think about race very much. As they travel south, though, they hear their parents make small remarks about racial segregation. On the road trip, for example, Kenny’s father acknowledges that Black people can’t drive into a Southern town and automatically assume they’ll find a motel or restaurant that will serve them. Worse, after white supremacists bomb a church near Grandma Sands’s house, Kenny and Byron glimpse the terrifying hatred that racists harbor toward Black people. Left to piece together why anyone would ever harm a church full of children, Kenny and Byron are unable to come up with any good answers, since there aren’t any good answers to this question. By showing how Kenny and his brother grapple with these issues, then, the novel shows just how difficult it can be to make sense of why, exactly, things like race and class can divide society so starkly.

Although Kenny and Byron don’t think much about race until they leave their predominantly Black community, they do think about wealth and social class. Their family certainly isn’t rich, but they enjoy certain privileges that not everyone at school has. For instance, Wilona buys her children high-quality leather gloves each winter. In fact, she buys them each two pairs so that they’ll still have good gloves if they lose the first ones. In contrast, Larry Dunn has nothing but lightweight, torn clothing. Similarly, Rufus and his little brother, Cody, have to share clothing, switching off who gets to wear their single pair of jeans. Rufus also doesn’t have winter gloves, nor does he ever bring lunch to school. Kenny takes note of the ways in which the children around him don’t have quite as much, but he doesn’t let this discrepancy make him feel superior to his peers. Rather, his impulse is to help people who have less than him, as evidenced by the fact that he shares both his gloves and his lunches with Rufus. Kenny’s way of navigating class differences is therefore to selflessly share whatever he has, suggesting that he cares more about making his friends happy than about hoarding his own possessions.

Byron, on the other hand, is fixated on the idea that having money can give people a certain sense of status or superiority. His thoughts about money and status surface when his mother tells him to go to the store and ask if the family can pay for the food later on. Byron immediately jumps to the conclusion that his family is on welfare—an idea that horrifies him. The mere thought that his family might need governmental assistance to feed itself feels shameful to him, but Wilona tells him that he’s acting privileged and conceited. She calls him “Mr. High and Mighty” and reveals that, though the family isn’t on welfare at the moment, Byron has eaten welfare food in the past and will, “if need be,” eat it again. What’s more, she emphasizes that “food is food,” thereby urging her son to see that his condescending view of people who eat welfare food is shallow and classist. Somebody who has a lot of money isn’t any better or more respectable than somebody who doesn’t have money, which is why Wilona makes a point of chastising Byron for placing too much value on whether or not their family is financially well-off.

As Byron and Kenny come to terms with their family’s financial status, they also begin to see how race impacts their position in American society. Their parents are well aware that Black people face many challenges in the United States. This was especially the case in the early 1960s, when racial segregation was still widely practiced in the South. But Kenny and Byron haven’t had many firsthand experiences of racism or discrimination because they live in a predominantly Black community in the North, where there are fewer tensions between white and Black citizens. And yet, it’s worth noting that racism still impacts people even when it’s not overt or immediately recognizable—like, for instance, by making it harder for people in the Black community to secure well-paying jobs, ultimately leading to the kind of widespread financial struggles that seemingly everyone in Kenny’s neighborhood experiences.

When the Watsons drive down to Birmingham, though, Byron and Kenny encounter a much more observable kind of racism. They learn that even the simplest things—like peeing in the woods at an empty rest stop—can be dangerous for Black people traveling in the South in the 1960s. Even more devastating, they have to find some way to understand why two racists bomb the church that Joey attends while in Birmingham. And yet, it’s impossible for them to understand why anyone would do such a thing. Indeed, the novel itself doesn’t suggest that there’s a good way of making sense of racist violence. To the contrary, it simply spotlights Kenny and Byron’s attempt to emotionally process the bleak reality of racism in the United States, indicating that—one way or another—this reality is something that most (if not all) Black Americans are unfortunately forced to recognize at some point in their lives.