Throughout history, the idea of race due to difference in skin color has created many strong beliefs in individuals and difficult questions. Dating back to the earliest human civilizations, differences in human characteristics, specifically the color of one's skin, has formed both small barriers between individuals and great dividers between civilizations. Because of these discrepancies, the belief in the superiority of white skin over black skin or the Anglo-Saxon race over African races has been instilled in some cultures. In The Little Black Boy, William Blake confronts this issue of racial bias between white and black people through the voice of a young, black boy. And through the poem's boy, Blake asks whether people whose skin is black are created in the same likeness of God and there is a possibility that whites and blacks will ever truly be considered equal in the eyes of all humans. .
From the opening stanza, the Little Black Boy calls for knowledge of God's purpose when creating people whose skin is black and it presents the struggles against religious perception here in the humanly world. Beginning in the second line, Blake inserts the religious reference to the soul by saying, "I am black, but O! my soul is white." Because white is the symbol of purity and innocence, the boy's statement is immediately addresses the racial indifference and inserts the boy's desire to be white. The boy acknowledges that because he was born black, a perception that he was born from a different light of God than white people exists. An inherent belief during the period was that black skin meant impurity and a lack of love from their creator, however in the fourth stanza, Blake begins to question why God created black people different than those white people. .
Blake speaks through the mother in the poem who says, "We are put here on earth to bare the beams of love and these black bodies and this sun burnt face is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.