to highlight the complexities and commonalities of Black identity. The unique style of narration allows Thompson-Spires to comment on how descriptions of racial identity impact people’s perception of an individual. For instance, consider how she addresses the reader while writing about Riley:

He was not self-hating; he was even listening to Drake—though you could make it Fetty Wap if his appreciation for trap music changes something for you, because all that’s relevant here is that he wasn’t against the music of “his people” or anything like that.

In this passage, Thompson-Spires is sketching out Riley’s identity for the reader. Like an artist making a sketch, she does not draw definitive lines. Instead, she loosely outlines what Riley could be listening to in order to convey her main point about how who Riley is. In the end, the narrator even reflects on the nature of such sketches and how they shape identity:

But I couldn’t draw the bodies while the heads talked over me, and the mosaic formed in blood, and what is a sketch but a chalk outline done in pencil or words? And what is a black network narrative but the story of one degree of separation, of sketching the same pain over and over, wading through so much flesh trying to draw new conclusions, knowing that wishing would not make them so?

Here, Thompson-Spires brings attention to the common threads in the Black experience. She has provided brief sketches, glimpses, into everyday, seemingly ordinary aspects of Black life that end with unarmed Black men being shot by the police. In doing so, she shows her readers that no matter what the sketch looks like, no matter who a Black person is or what they are doing, they are still connected to the painful legacies and continued threat of racism.