This book is a chronicle of the mental and emotional changes of a sensitive man living in a black body in America. It's at times poetic and honest about deep emotion, and though most of the time he's addressing his son, the author speaks to the silent observer who takes their white body for granted in the luxury of ignorance. He never uses the term "white privilege," and he's less accusing than James Baldwin, but he welcomes the reader into his head and to see with his eyes.

"I wanted you to see different people living by different rules."

Coates has a complicated relationship with the place that he grew up. He complains that he was in a fight for survival, keeping his body safe, and putting him at the very bottom rung of Maslowe's hierarchy of needs. However, he justifies the very system of violence that he abhors, he casts it as an act of defiant identity creation and protection for the people living in his community from outsiders. It's very complicated for him as he talks to his son. He wants the best for his son, and he doesn't want him "blinded by fear" when dealing with the rest of the world, but he still wants him to remember where he came from and the struggle of his people, who are they his people? Are they really a race? Race is a concept created by the oppressor, so it can't be that. The conflict of wanting to pass on your child a Heritage, but not the negative aspects of that heritage hold universal appeal.

His experience of feeling free from all of the racial baggage that he experienced every day in New York City is not uncommon among American people in Paris. The idea that learning French in school seems pointless because you don't know any French people to talk to transforms into realizing subjects like French are Bridges to other universes with a different culture, with an entirely different way of thinking, and an entirely different way of perceiving beauty.