Brooks explains in one of her memoirs that Marc Crawford, a highly respected Black editor, prompted her to write “Boy Breaking Glass” with the question of “[h]ow ghetto blacks, overwhelmed by inequity and white power, manage to live. Does a black boy […] turn his eyes away from the Statue of Liberty? How does he talk to himself to comfort himself? What beauties are at his disposal?” (Brooks, Gwendolyn. Report, p. 190). In “Boy Breaking Glass,” Brooks explores possible answers to that question. Brooks relies on imagery, diction, and ambiguity to make the case that art in its present state is inadequate to represent the struggle of the dispossessed.

The poem’s title parodies traditional Western art, which represents subordinate people—women, exoticized Others, laborers, and people of color—as objects for the consumption of a privileged viewer. The dedication to Marc Crawford, “from whom the commission” (Line ii), calls attention to the poem as a work of art, something a cultural gatekeeper asked the writer to create. The voice in the early part of the poem belongs to an observer, one trained to look at art critically.