The “Knowledge” recurs as a term Coates uses for the alternative skills learned outside the institution: how to talk to girls, how to look cool, how to style one’s hair, how to play basketball with authority, how to fight and win. Big Bill excels as a student of the Knowledge, whereas Coates does not initially. The Knowledge is sometimes used to refer to another alternative form of knowledge: the black histories outside of the white Western canon. This type of Knowledge is what leads one into “Consciousness,” that is: the understanding of the necessity for the liberation of black people all over and the revolution of African Americans in a society that devalues them. This Consciousness can range in its strictness, with Coates’s father as the extreme example of Conscious Man: he expands his pro-blackness beliefs to be anti-religion, anti-nationalism, and anti-consumerism, meaning his children don’t eat meat or celebrate national holidays. Over time, Coates comes into his own version of Consciousness as he reads texts about the Black Panthers. 

Mecca is the term Coates uses throughout the book to refer to Howard University, an HBCU (Historically Black College or University) where his father works and where, as Coates portrays it, “Conscious” African Americans aspire to attend.