Coates begins the book by emphasizing the power bestowed in US police forces to exterminate black bodies when they see fit. He uses recent police killings as examples, from Michael Brown, whose murderers were acquitted despite mounting evidence, to Renisha McBride, who was killed for knocking on someone’s door to ask for help. Coates’s goal in this book-length letter to his son Samori is to make his son aware of the power and legacy of racial violence in the United States so that Samori can survive. Coates cites Samori’s pained response to the acquittal of Michael Brown’s killers as a moment of reckoning—the first time that Coates sees his son contend with the precarity of his body.

Coates recalls contending with the fragility of his own body as a young boy in Baltimore. Coates describes how he is almost shot by a boy with a gun over a trivial incident. He remembers that the lived experience of needing to protect his body fuels his disillusionment with his schools; Coates begins to view schools as another form of control rather than a path to liberation. Though school systems understand the bodily harm that can befall black students at any moment, this fact goes unaddressed and ignored in their education.