Ghost Boys Themes

Ghost Boys follows the ghost of a 12-year-old Black boy, Jerome Rogers, in the months after a white police officer shoots Jerome while he’s playing outside with a toy gun. By also telling the story of historical figure Emmett Till, a Black boy who was murdered by a lynch mob in 1955, the novel shows how the U.S. has made progress toward racial equality since Emmett Till’s experience in the “Jim Crow”…

Ghost Boys implicitly argues that while legally mandated racial discrimination has ended in the U.S., the U.S. legal system has remained racist because people enforce the law in racist ways. This argument is clearest in the novel’s representations of Officer Moore, who shoots 12-year-old Black boy Jerome Rogers to death in Chicago, and of the judge who determines whether Officer Moore will be charged with a crime. Officer Moore claims that he is not…

Fear is a natural emotion that everyone feels sometimes—but because fear involves implicit belief about the world, Ghost Boys suggests that it is important for people to analyze their fear and overcome it if it is motivated by false, prejudiced beliefs. The novel’s inciting incident is the death of Jerome Rogers, a 12-year-old Black boy who lives in a dangerous Chicago neighborhood. A white policeman, Officer Moore, shoots Jerome to death while Jerome…

In Ghost Boys, education might help build an anti-racist future—yet the novel shows how both disadvantaged and privileged children struggle to learn relevant lessons in school, though for different reasons. The novel’s protagonist, a 12-year-old Black boy named Jerome Rogers, struggles to learn lessons relevant to his life because the school in his impoverished Chicago neighborhood lacks resources. His school doesn’t have a librarian. While he would love to learn a foreign language…