Shortly after Samori is born, Coates is pulled over by Prince George’s County police, a police department in the Maryland suburbs outside DC that many in Coates’s writing circle had warned him about. PG County police have a history of killing people without due cause, the most high-profile cases of which include Elmer Clay Newman and Gary Hopkins. In September of that same year, Coates picks up The Washington Post to see that PG County police killed one of his Howard classmates, Prince Carmen Jones, a kind and promising student. The officer, who had stopped Jones in plain clothing, claimed that Jones tried to run him over with his Jeep. The officer was a “known liar,” having arrested a man on false evidence earlier that same year (79).

Coates remembers sitting at Jones’s funeral and feeling unmoved by the community’s religious cries for forgiveness of the officer. Coates is again reminded of the systematic way in which black people are killed in America, maintaining, “I knew that Prince was not killed by a single officer so much as he was murdered by his country and all the fears that have marked it from birth” (78). According to Coates, the police reflect all of America’s fear and the inherent flaws of its criminal justice policy.

Jones’s death stokes Coates’s fear of losing his own body. Coates posits that if an educated, Christian, ambitious young man like Jones can be killed, who could not? Coates begins to understand his father’s mantra of “Either I can beat him or the police” (82). With this clarity, Coates writes, “Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered” (82). Coates writes about Jones and the history of the PG County police. He questions why, if the police officer who killed Jones was black in a county led by black politicians, that justice for Jones is of no concern. Through his journalism, Coates investigates the internalized racism that views the destruction of black bodies as “incidental to the preservation of order” even within black communities (84).

Coates and the girl from Chicago move to New York City after he accepts a job there. They arrive two months before September 11, 2001. Coates recalls sitting on the roof and watching smoke billow from the Twin Towers. He reflects on how terror was brought to NYC in the form of downtown slave auctions well before Bin Laden. He finds the bloated patriotism in the wake of 9/11 ironic in light of America’s legacy of terrorizing black people.

Coates forms a community in Brooklyn composed mainly of former Howard classmates. He is struck by how different his neighborhood is compared to the monied streets of downtown or gentrifying Harlem. He observes how young white families take up entire streets and sidewalks with no regard for other passersby, noting, “The galaxy belonged to them, and as terror was communicated to our children, I saw mastery communicated to theirs” (89). Coates recalls his rage when a white woman pushes his four-year-old son to prompt him to move faster. A white man comes to the woman’s defense, yelling at Coates, “I could have you arrested,” which Coates interprets as, “I could take your body” (95). Later, Coates chides himself for his anger, remembering the same advice that he gives his son: More responsibility is required of black men over their bodies, or else they are seen as a threat. Coates further clarifies, “the story of a black body’s destruction must always begin with his or her error” (96). He cites Eric Gardner’s anger and Trayvon Martin’s alleged last words, “You are gonna die tonight” (96).