Anger Is a Gift

Police brutality is the most readily apparent of the novel’s themes. It is central to the lives of several characters and plays a role in each of the key plot points. Our first encounter with it comes when we learn that Moss is still traumatized from witnessing his father being murdered by the police when he was ten years old. The fact that this occurs during a protest against another instance of the police murdering an unarmed person of color helps to highlight that this is not a historical issue but an ongoing one; that it is, as Wanda later observes “our reality” (284). One of the most significant things explored in this context is that police brutality is not only a recurrent event but one for which the police—individual officers, specific forces, or the institution itself—are rarely held responsible. The media is repeatedly shown to be overly deferential to the police, helping to pass the blame onto the victim, often disseminating outright lies in order to support the police’s justifications. Indeed, Wanda believes Moss’s father’s murder was a targeted attack performed in retribution for Wanda releasing footage of another murder by police officers.