Education activist and historian Dadzie notes that Heart of the Race is a clear example of black women coming together to say "this is how we see it from where we stand". She tells Refinery29: "I think one of the reasons why the book had such resonance with other black women is that we used the collective ‘we’; we told the story from how it felt in our own shoes which was quite rare, given when the book was written." Dadzie recounts an occasion that demonstrated the impact of their work to her. "When we were launching the book in the mid '80s, we had an event and there was a black woman in the audience and she was in tears. She said to us, 'I’ve heard these stories around my grandmother’s table all my life but I’ve never seen it in print.' It really shows us that we have to take it upon ourselves to document our own lives because if we don’t do that, our stories will die with us and it will be someone else’s take on how our lives evolved and the socioeconomic influences that shaped them."