Simone C. Drake spent the first several decades of her life learning how to love and protect herself, a black woman, from the systems designed to facilitate her harm and marginalization. But when she gave birth to the first of her three sons, she quickly learned that black boys would need protection from these very same systems--systems dead set on the static, homogenous representations of black masculinity perpetuated in the media and our cultural discourse.

In When We Imagine Grace, Drake borrows from Toni Morrison's Beloved to bring imagination to the center of black...