Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Dear Martin, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Privilege, Entitlement, and Implicit Bias
Appearances and Assumptions
Support, Acceptance, and Belonging
Opportunity and Upward Mobility
The Media and Public Discourse
Summary
Analysis
“Good evening, and welcome to the Channel 5 News at 5,” a reporter reads on the evening news. The reporter explains that two “young men” were shot at a traffic light that afternoon. “According to the wife of the shooter—who was riding in the passenger seat—there was a brief dispute over loud music before shots were fired from one vehicle to the other.” The reporter also says that one of the teenagers died on the way to the hospital. The other is in “critical condition.” As for the shooter, he has been identified as Garrett Tison, an off-duty police officer.
That Manny and Justyce have been shot simply for playing loud music once again debunks Jared’s out-of-touch argument that racism and inequality no longer exist in the United States. Within the course of a single year, Justyce has been the victim of two racially motivated acts of aggression. What’s more, both of the men who antagonize him are police officers, the very people who are supposed to protect people like him. This suggests that bigotry is still deeply intertwined with the country’s foundational modes of governance. It’s also worth noting that, though this scenario might seem unlikely to some readers, Stone based this plot point on the 2012 shooting of a seventeen-year-old black boy named Jordan Davis, who was murdered by a white man after refusing to turn the music in his car down.
Themes
