Susan Willis compares Hazel in "Raymond's Run" to the protagonists of Toni Morrison's novels The Bluest Eye and Sula, which she argues similarly use the child's perspective to "expose the contradictions of capitalist society". Willis identifies the race official who calls Hazel by her nickname "Squeaky", and suggests she let another runner win, as a central figure, and argues his presence "articulates the manipulative control figures of authority seek to exercise in any given situation. Willis argues the story is characterised by a "sense of politics as opposition and contestation" inherited from the 1960s counterculture, but simultaneously suggests another form of politics, and other, less oppositional relationships, in particular through Hazel's relationships with Gretchen and Raymond.
Elliott Butler-Evans reads Hazel's willingness to defend Raymond as evidence of the character's "toughness and independence" and her "rejection of 'approved' feminine roles", and finds this rejection to be further exemplified by her commentary on ways girls and women are encouraged to compete with another. Butler-Evans argues that "Raymond's Run" "marks the emergence of a consciousness grounded in feminine and proto-feminist experiences" through its "questioning and challenging of gender roles, the insertion of the problem of female bonding in the text, and, most significantly, the construction of a rebellious antisocial girl protagonist", all of which "produce counter discourses that challenge the dominant hierarchical discourse of Black cultural nationalism.
Elizabeth Muther reads the story in connection to Bambara's non-fiction book The Black Woman (1970), which was published less than a year prior to "Raymond's Run"'s first publication, and the response to the Moynihan Report of 1965. Mother argues that Bambara's use of child narrators in "Raymond's Run" and "Gorilla, My Love" allows her to "answer back, through the prescience and self-assurance of children, to the fraudulent postulates of an anxiety-stricken white supremacist culture. In Muther's reading, the story's "transformational power" resides in Hazel's realization of her connection to Gretchen and Raymond and of their worth. Mother suggests that Hazel recalls the Moynihan Report account of the African-American matriarch by virtue of her independence and resilience, while problematizing such a reading through her relationship with Raymond; and that she and her family thus offer a critique of the report's "liberal condescension
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