Rashad is African American, an aspiring artist, the son of a police officer and a member of the ROTC. Quinn is white, a loving big brother, the son of a soldier who died in Afghanistan, and a member of a winning basketball team. Both boys find their understanding of the world challenged when Rashad is brutally beaten by a cop for a crime he didn’t commit outside a neighborhood store, and Quinn witnesses it from the sidewalk. Quinn is shocked and devastated to realize that the cop who beat Rashad is actually the older brother of his best friend.  Rashad is shocked and devastated to realize that the beating has brought up a painful incident in his father’s past that paints him in a new and disappointing light. In the week following the incident, Rashad and Quinn begin questioning the safety and fairness of the society they thought they knew.
Rashad: “I wasn’t sure what to do about any of it, or if I even wanted anyone else to do anything on my behalf. The looks on my friends’ and family’s faces–it hurt me to see them that way. Especially knowing that it hurt them to see me this way. I didn’t deserve this. None of us did. None of us.”
Quinn: “I wasn’t going to stand there and and pretend I knew what life was like for Rashad. There was no way. We lived in the same goddamn city, went to the same goddamn school, and our lives were so very goddamn different…Nobody wants to think he’s being a racist, but maybe it was a bigger problem, like everyone was just ignoring it, like it was invisible.”
With quiet lyricism and unexpected poetry, co-authors Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely help readers make sense of “the problem we all live with” with empathy and a serious appreciation for just how deep our biases run and how much we are trying–as a community, as a people, as a nation–to overcome them. This wise, timely book is thought-provoking, philosophical, and a call to action that anyone who reads it will have a hard time ignoring.