Coates uses his own life to emphasize the book’s core themes, most pointedly the precarity of the black body. He begins the book by illustrating the ignorance of those who live under the spell of the Dream, writing of an interview in which a news anchor implores him to speak of hope in the face of police brutality. This lack of awareness shows Coates the rampant unwillingness of white Americans to see or address the root of racial violence.

Coates references his own childhood in Baltimore to paint a picture of everyday racism. He describes the streets he grew up on, where young boys used fashion and the threat of violence to protect themselves from their own fragility. Coates recalls an early instance in which he was almost shot for a trivial matter. He references his school experiences and how his teachers sanitized black history and stunted his curiosity, opting for compliance instead. By referring to his own childhood, Coates doubles down on his argument that state institutions, and America’s social and legal systems in general, harm more than they help black children.

As the book directly addresses Coates’s son Samori, Coates often returns to the transformative experience of fatherhood. He describes his own father’s corporal punishment as a response to state violence against black men.