Culture and nature
When Moody's family moves to town so she can go to school, she realizes that life is surprisingly full of dramatic irony; there is so much about her own land that she does not know. As an American citizen and a young black girl in the mid-twentieth century, she found that her life is going to be full of intricate and emotional frustrations and struggles that she could simply not conceive of as a young child growing up on her parent's farm in rural Mississippi. Among the most astonishing changes is how she is allowed to be treated just because of her skin color.
Irony and experience
Moody's story reveals the ironic quality of experience, as opposed to innocence. Her account of rural life is a kind of miracle on the earth. Her family is safe and hard-working, and they work hard to provide through sharecropping. They raise Anne to be a thoughtful and active person, and she is naturally curious and insightful, so when she realizes that one of the fundamental aspects of her identity, something she cannot change, makes her vulnerable to violence and mistreatment, that is a painful awakening into the world of experience. By the end of that painful awakening, Moody will literally have to accept her mortality in the name of her beliefs.
The irony of law
Moody also bears witness to political and legal corruption among Mississippi. In terms of racism against Black people, Mississippi during the mid-20th century is kind of a fever pitch. Moody is a full-blown witness of injustice, because she fully expects that the police will not tolerate violence or threat of violence, and certainly not for something as meaningless and involuntary as race. She is wrong. During her life, police actively stood against legal Civil Rights demonstrations and the law stood by and let murders occur against the Black community for offenses as small as whistling at a white woman. The law is ironically human, and since the racism was so ubiquitous, the police were all typically racist too.
Death as a symbol
It would be easy to say, "What's the big deal? People don't have to always like each other." But that point of view severely underestimates the ironically heinous hatred of white supremacists. The Ku Klux Klan is a reminder of this. Moody is on their hit list, so the reader is invited to consider what that means for her mental health; she must chronically fear the random invasion of her home, the attack of her person by innumerable murderously violent people in white hoods (knowing what that means). Then to be beaten and dragged out into the wilderness to be murdered. This makes death into a symbol of Moody's consciousness. Her fight for justice is involuntarily religious; she must spiritually accept death to do the right thing. That makes fate extremely ironic.
Moody's identity
One fascinating question about Anne Moody is what might she have been like as a person in a just society. That aspect of her character is in some ways obscured by her more important ethical response to racism in her community and her life of self-sacrifice and activism. There is therefore a dramatic irony with regards to Moody's personality and self. Flipped on its head, this irony can be seen as an irony of destiny, because Moody's personality was fitting to her role on the earth.
