The interactions of the characters pose better, more pressing questions than any other piece of Young Adult literature I know. For non-black children growing up in majority white suburban areas, it hopefully will prevent them from asking the first black person they meet when they go to university about their standardized test scores or where they can score weed.
For non-white children in white supremacist USA, I think it is vital to learn the difference between good-time white colleagues and true white friends. And that knowledge becomes only more vital as you become an adult in the corporate workplace.
Why might a black mother both send her black child to an overwhelmingly white private school and discourage him from having white girlfriends? Why might she not want her son to talk to the police? Why is Justyce, the black protagonist, reluctant to have racial disparities in the police and judicial systems as their topic in advance pairs argumentation? Why might a black graduate from a majority white high school have trepidation about attending a historically black college? And these only scratch the surface.
An exercise an educator may assign to students is for the students to find news reports of actual incidents of police brutality which resemble the fictional ones in the novel.
Finally, I hope that this novel would inspire readers, whether young or old, to learn more about Martin Luther King. I think A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is a great start. There's a lot more to this man than "content of character" and "color of skin."
P.S. I should elaborate on "the difference between good-time white colleagues and true white friends." This is of course necessary regardless of your ethnicity and that of the people with whom you choose to associate. All I wanted to emphasize here was that non-whites in a white supremacist society incur more risk in such relationships. If a group of teenagers, like a wolf's cubs exploring the territory outside the lair of their birth and upbringing, get into trouble, society is more likely to punish the non-whites in the group, especially if the whites in the group have resources such as money for lawyers and contacts in the police, judiciary, local government and school administration. If anti-blackness leads investigators in the direction of the black teen(s), investigations can sometimes proceed in that direction by force of momentum. I hope that clarifies what I mean.
P.P.S. Some people in my hometown are collecting $ to distribute copies to students in our area
