Twyla is black and Roberta is white. As children, they were close friends. However, when they grow up and leave the orphanage, their lives diverge. Morrison uses them to demonstrate how racism infiltrates the lives of black and white women, taking a pair of women who started life as natural allies, due to being a pair of abandoned and impoverished girls, but who grow apart due to society's willingness to grant Roberta privileges that elude Twyla.

One of those privileges is access to good, well-funded schools. Roberta's sign, "Mothers have rights, too!" is a protest against school busing programs which would have brought black children from less advantaged neighborhoods into white communities to attend school. Such programs became common in the 1970s as a means to address the lingering effects of enforced school segregation, as well as the impact of racist real estate and banking policies, which confined black people to particular neighborhoods.

Roberta is using her status as a white woman to elevate the needs of her children over those of black children, with whom she does not want to share educational resources. Twyla's sign directly responds to Roberta's presumed privilege. Twyla knows that she cannot compete with Roberta as a fellow woman, given the social preference for white women as emblems of femininity, but she can argue that black children deserve the same educational advantages as white children.