Racism

Racism is not presented as a single prejudice or isolated insult but as a system that organizes Niru Ikemadu’s everyday life, bodily vulnerability, and posthumous public meaning. The novel places his experience as a Black Nigerian American teenager alongside white privilege, racial mockery, police suspicion, and the unequal credibility granted to competing accounts of violence.

Everyday Racialization

Niru’s earliest memories show racism operating through apparently playful intimacy. White children touch his hair as if they own it, call him Velcro Head, and attach objects to it to see what will stick. When a girl asks whether she can look down his pants to settle a debate after sex education, Niru pretends not to hear, then spends the rest of the day staring at the floor with clenched fists. His silence is not consent; it is a survival response to being outnumbered and to his childhood inability to distinguish ignorance from malice. The episode establishes racism as a bodily experience, one that turns his hair, clothing, and private anatomy into public property.

That racial exposure continues at school and among peers who treat Blackness as performance material. At the party, drunk white students imitate Black speech and laugh at Black people while shouting racial slang. The track team dances to “I’m on a New Level” as though Black movement itself were a comic spectacle, while Adam frames Niru’s racial and sexual identity through taunting. In the locker room, Adam and Rowan reduce Niru’s sexuality to a joke, and the surrounding students’ willingness to watch rather than intervene makes the humiliation collective. Racism here is joined to homophobia: Niru is made into an object whose Blackness and queerness can be consumed, mimicked, or mocked by others who remain socially protected.

Privilege, Class, and Suspicion

The contrast between Niru and his white classmates becomes explicit during the traffic stop. After speeding twenty-five miles over the limit, Niru sees police lights and immediately recalls OJ’s warning to keep both hands visible. OJ had previously been forced face-down and handcuffed in a Safeway parking lot after police received a report of a Black man allegedly trying to steal luxury cars. A neighbor’s intervention may have prevented arrest or death, but the officers still treated OJ as a threat in broad daylight on Thanksgiving. The family’s wealth does not erase racial vulnerability; a Black driver remains exposed even when driving his father’s Range Rover.

Niru compares this danger with the impunity available to George Gilvert Monson Jr., a blond, blue-eyed classmate whose wealthy father can absorb the consequences of reckless behavior. The difference is not simply economic. Both boys may have access to privilege, but only one is presumed harmless. Niru’s wealthy father will not subsidize his foolishness, yet Niru understands that wealth cannot purchase the racial innocence automatically attributed to George. The novel therefore links racism to class without treating class as a substitute for race: material security narrows some risks while leaving the policing of Black bodies intact.

Institutional and Familial Violence

Racial hierarchy also intersects with immigrant identity and family authority. When Niru’s father attacks him after learning about his relationship with a man, he describes homosexuality as shame and disgrace and threatens to send Niru back to Nigeria for religious correction. The assault is homophobic, but its language also reveals the pressure placed on an immigrant family to preserve respectability through strict masculine and parental control. Niru is disciplined as a son whose body allegedly disgraces the family, while the wider American environment has already marked him as racially different and sexually available for ridicule.

The religious intervention intensifies this logic by treating Niru’s identity as an unclean spirit to be removed. Bishop Okereke and the prayer warriors press him toward the floor, cover his head with their palms, and pray for the spirit of homosexuality and perversity to be cast out. Their demand that he return to obedience makes bodily coercion appear as spiritual care. Racism is not the only oppression in this scene, but the scene clarifies the layered position from which Niru suffers: he is a Black youth, a Nigerian son, an immigrant-family subject, and a gay person whose body is claimed by several authorities at once. The resulting vulnerability cannot be explained by any one category in isolation.

Policing, Violence, and Unequal Credibility

The fatal confrontation in the alley shows how racial stereotypes convert confusion into lethal force. Meredith follows Niru after their argument at the party, pushes him from behind, and is lifted against a wall when he responds by restraining her. When police arrive, their command is directed at Niru: he must step away from the woman and raise his hands. He complies, creating a sudden distance between them, but then reaches reflexively toward the sound of a phone call. The police shoot him. He lies in his father’s shirt with his white sneakers still pristine while Black blood gathers in potholes.

The image makes race material and unmistakable. Niru’s body is read first as the body of a dangerous Black male suspect, while Meredith is immediately told that she is safe and that he cannot hurt her. The narration does not erase the fact that Niru had physically restrained Meredith, but it exposes the asymmetry through which the encounter is interpreted: his fear and movement become evidence of threat, whereas the surrounding circumstances disappear beneath police procedure and racial expectation. His death is therefore both a personal tragedy and an instance of police brutality structured by the presumption that Black masculinity is inherently dangerous.

Public Memory and Responsibility

After Niru’s death, racism becomes visible in the public protests that gather at Dupont Circle. Meredith later sees the site as an ordinary urban space, with streetlamps, red car lights, commuters, phones, and people absorbed in private concerns. Yet it was also the center of one of the city’s largest impromptu protests, where teenagers carried signs reading “White Lies Cost Black Lives” and performance artists appeared naked in iron collars and chains. The contrast between normality and remembered upheaval shows how quickly racial crisis can be absorbed into the city’s routine, even when its consequences remain morally unresolved.

Meredith’s later encounter with Niru’s father exposes another dimension of racial injustice: the struggle to make a Black family’s account intelligible to those who control the narrative. He comes to Meredith’s house asking her to say that Niru was not a rapist and that the alley did not reveal his true character. Her parents answer in the language of a “difficult situation,” but Niru’s father rejects that equivalence. His son is dead, while Meredith is alive, and he understands that the accusation against Niru can continue to define him after death. His fear that the police might kill him too shows how racialized suspicion extends beyond the original victim, making grief itself a dangerous public position.

Racism thus governs the novel’s movement from childhood humiliation to institutional surveillance, lethal policing, and contested remembrance. It works through touch, jokes, stereotypes, police commands, and the authority to decide whose testimony counts. Niru’s death sparks protest, but the recurring return to ordinary streets and ordinary conversations suggests that the deepest challenge is not merely exposing one racist act; it is resisting the social machinery that repeatedly converts Black suffering into spectacle, misunderstanding, and forgettable history.