While Khalil’s violent death at the hands of Officer 115 stands as the most powerful example of this theme in the novel, the entire story and all of its subplots are designed to highlight the myriad effects of systemic racism on the everyday lives of Black Americans. To this end, Starr and her family experience racism in a variety of contexts, from the traumatic to the mundane.

As stated, the most overt form of systemic racism in the novel occurs when  Khalil is racially profiled by a police officer who shoots him on the assumption that he is going for a gun. Despite the fact that Khalil was innocent and there was no reason for him to have been pulled over in the first place, the police and the white community immediately assume that Khalil was in the wrong and that Officer 115 was right. It takes 10 weeks for a decision to be made about whether to indict the officer, and even then, the jury decides not to punish him for his heinous actions. This kind of decision is statistically proven to reflect real-life injustices that occur often in the American legal system, and the author uses this scenario to emphasize the grim reality that Black lives matter less than white lives to the people in charge.