Much of what is difficult about Canada’s neighborhood, and his experience of growing up in it, can be attributed to structural racism. This racism is rarely mentioned directly in the book yet is implied and pervasive throughout it. Canada and his family live in an almost entirely black and Latino neighborhood, which also happens to be violent and poor. As Canada states about his chaotic public school, there are only “a few white students whose parents had not yet managed to flee the crumbling tenements of the Bronx” (42). It is in large part because of racist policies in hiring, schooling and policing that families like Canada’s remain trapped in the Bronx. Canada’s single mother must find a way to survive and to take care of her family on a combination of welfare and minimum-wage jobs; as Canada tells us, minimum wage is “all that they paid even the most competent black woman in 1958” (14).

The neighborhood is, moreover, not taken seriously by the police, as is seen by a disturbing encounter in Chapter 3 of the book, between Canada and a pair of white policemen. The policemen have been summoned to Canada’s family’s apartment because of a robbery: Canada’s older brother Daniel has had ten dollars stolen from him, which is, as Canada points out, “probably one-fifth of what we had to live on for the week” (27).