Content Warning: This text discusses systemic racism, police violence, and the death of a Black man.

The events of Open Water are substantially influenced by the emotional consequences of oppression, specifically systemic racism manifesting as the criminalization of Blackness. The effect of this daily injustice on the narrator is that he minimizes himself and refuses vulnerability, which culminates in the novel as a major depressive episode that destroys his relationship. The book details that other Black people, typically men, have similar experiences, cementing the emotional costs of racism as a central theme.

The racial profiling of Black men by police is fueled by the assumption that Black men are violent, which the narrator address when looking into the eyes of a policeman holding him at gunpoint. “[I]nstead of questioning himself, of interrogating his beliefs […] [the cop] continues to look at you as a danger,” states the protagonist, explicitly using the phrase “fit the profile” in the next line (65). The police officers, representing the forces of white supremacism in Open Water, see a stereotype when looking at a Black man, which causes the social diminishment of Black individuality, a process that the narrator internalizes.