Although The Ways of White Folks is satirically humorous and progresses through the beautiful merger of prose and poetry, it, too, like much of Wright's naturalistic fiction, reveals a world in which whites do not understand their behavior, in which they are not in touch with themselves, and, thus, in which they are both physically dangerous to blacks and psychologically dangerous to themselves and to blacks. Hughes's The Ways of White Folks presents numerous black and white women characters, demonstrating the integral role white women play in propagating social and moral racial codes that affect the lives of both black women and men. In fact, a black or a white woman is either the protagonist or a pivotal character in every story in The Ways of White Folks. In describing the multifaceted manifestations of racism found among all classes of whites across the United States, The Ways of White Folks emerges as an ingenious analysis of the interrelationship between race, class, and gender. Racism, interestingly enough, is a cultural and political phenomenon rooted in the merger of the concepts of race and culture.
Racism then signifies the merger of race and culture.
What is perhaps most striking about The Ways of White Folks is both the amount of space Hughes gives to women characters and his depiction of how racism and class have affected their lives. Even though all of the fourteen stories in the collection contain female characters, both black and white, and though eleven of the stories feature black women characters, it is interesting that three of the most powerful and moving stories in the collection have black women as major characters. The Ways of White Folks, he begins and ends the book with black women characters who are strikingly different from each other and who serve as points of reference for the female characters in the other stories. Though Cora represents a traditional depiction of the black woman, Coralee emerges as a rather strikingly nontraditional, equally as convincing portrait of the black woman before and after slavery. During slavery, Coralee is just a young girl on the then young Colonel Norwood's plantation.