Key Themes
Theme 1: Racism and the Care System
The novel’s central theme is structural racism — specifically, how racist outcomes can be produced by systems that do not see themselves as racist. The care system does not explicitly state that white babies are worth more than mixed-race children. But its processes, priorities, and outcomes reveal exactly that hierarchy.
De Waal shows racism working in two ways. Some characters are openly racist, and the police harass Black people on the street. But the deeper harm is structural: racism also operates through processes: who is considered ‘adoptable,’ whose needs are prioritised, whose family bonds are valued. This is more insidious — and harder to challenge — than individual prejudice.
The separation of Leon and Jake is the novel’s sharpest critique. Jake is adopted because the system has white families waiting for white babies. Leon is fostered because the system lacks equivalent demand for mixed-race older children. The social workers do not act out of personal hatred — but the outcome is racist. De Waal forces the reader to confront how bias can be built into institutions.
Racism in the novel extends beyond the care system. Leon encounters it in school, on the streets, and in the wider community. The social hierarchies of 1981 Birmingham place Black and mixed-race people at the bottom, denied equal access to housing, employment, and justice.
The Handsworth riots represent the community’s collective refusal to accept this position any longer. De Waal connects the personal (Leon’s separation from Jake) to the political (a community rising against structural oppression) to show that individual suffering and collective injustice have the same root cause.
Theme 2: Family and Separation
De Waal interrogates what ‘family’ means through multiple models: the birth family (Carol, Leon, Jake), the foster family (Maureen), the adoptive family (Jake’s new parents), and the wider community. The novel argues that bonds are created through love and presence, not biology alone — but also that severing existing bonds causes permanent damage.
The novel’s most powerful argument is that sibling bonds matter. The system treats Jake’s placement as a success — he has a stable, affluent home. But it ignores the severed connection to Leon. De Waal suggests that material provision is not the same as emotional wholeness, and that the system’s definition of ‘best interests’ is dangerously narrow.
Theme 3: Identity and Belonging
Leon’s identity is fractured by the system. He is mixed-race in a society that sees race in binary terms. He belongs to a white mother and a Black community. He is neither fully one thing nor another — and the system has no category for this complexity.
Tufty provides the cultural anchoring that the care system and Leon’s white carers cannot. Through Tufty and the allotment men, Leon gains access to Caribbean food, music, language, and community. This gives him a sense of belonging that the white institutional world has denied. De Waal suggests that identity is not innate but constructed through relationships and cultural immersion.
De Waal makes identity political. In 1981, mixed-race children in care were often placed with white families who could not help them develop a positive racial identity. The result was children who felt they belonged nowhere. Leon is placed with white carers, so De Waal gives him Tufty instead — a Black father figure who supplies what the placement cannot.
Leon’s name is itself significant. The title, My Name is Leon, is a statement of selfhood — a refusal to be reduced to a case number, a ‘placement,’ or a category. By insisting on his name, Leon insists on his individual humanity within a dehumanising system.
Theme 4: Childhood, Neglect and Innocence
The novel explores how neglect robs children of childhood. Leon should be playing, learning, and being carefree. Instead, he is feeding a baby, navigating social workers, and searching for his brother. De Waal shows that poverty and parental illness force children into premature adulthood — not because children are incapable, but because they should not have to be capable.
Yet Leon retains elements of childhood throughout: his love of the garden, his concrete thinking, his inability to grasp abstract concepts like ‘permanency.’ De Waal preserves his innocence even as the world strips it away. This tension between what Leon should be (a child) and what he is forced to become (a carer, a fighter, a survivor) generates the novel’s emotional power.
Theme 5: Class and Poverty
Class operates alongside race throughout the novel. Carol is working-class, unemployed, and without support networks. Jake’s adoptive family is middle-class and comfortable. The care system implicitly values material provision over emotional bonds — a middle-class home with two parents and a garden is deemed ‘better’ than a loving sibling relationship in a poorer setting.
De Waal shows how multiple forms of disadvantage intersect. Carol is disadvantaged by class (working-class), gender (single mother bearing sole responsibility), and circumstance (mental health, absent partners). Leon is disadvantaged by race (mixed-race), age (too old to be easily adopted), and family background (mother in crisis).
The novel argues that these disadvantages are not accidental but systemic. Thatcher’s Britain created conditions where working-class families were more likely to break down and Black children were more likely to be failed by the resulting care system. Individual suffering is connected to political choices.
Theme 6: The 1981 Riots — Resistance and Voice
The riots are not presented as mindless violence but as a form of political resistance. The community has been silenced, policed, and impoverished. The riot is the moment when that silence breaks. De Waal draws a direct parallel: just as Leon has been silenced by a system that does not listen to children, the Black community has been silenced by a state that does not listen to its citizens.
The novel suggests that when legitimate channels fail — when complaints are ignored, when the system does not change — eruption is inevitable. This applies to both the community (rioting) and Leon (acting out). De Waal does not condone violence, but she refuses to condemn it without acknowledging its causes.