Ghost Boys is an explicit effort to tell the story of Black Lives Matter for younger audiences. Parker Rhodes’s choice of characters, inciting event, and plot are all designed to translate the movement into a realistic, age-appropriate narrative.

Black Lives Matter is a modern civil rights movement designed to counter brutal policing and the dehumanization of Black people of all genders and ages. Mass, nonviolent protest is essential to the movement, and unlike American civil rights movements of past decades, Black Lives Matter has no centralized leadership. It relies on social media to help organize activities and protest actions. Black Lives Matter coalesced in reaction to the killings of Black children, teens, and men, including 17-year-old Trayvon Martin as the teen walked home from a snack run.

Black Lives Matter is the central historical and cultural context for the novel. The inciting event of the novel—the killing of Jerome Rogers by a police officer—is all but ripped from the headlines and is similar to the killing of Tamir Rice, who was killed in Cleveland, Ohio in 2014 as he played with a toy gun. In the aftermath of the killing of each of these children, stories designed to assign blame to the victims and exonerate the perpetrators arose in the media.