After the Shot Drops

Throughout the novel, the reality of life for the lower-middle class and the impoverished is evident. The novel demonstrates the struggles facing teens and their families trying to survive precarious financial times, along with the difficulty of escaping the poverty cycle.

One of the main struggles is the pressure and stress that poverty or a lower-middle-class existence places on the teenagers of the novel, although their struggles are not equal and they respond to them in different ways. For example, the furnace in Bunny’s apartment is broken, so he and his family are enduring a cold apartment during a cold late winter/early spring. Additionally, he sees less of his family than he would like because his mom works graveyard shifts at the hospital and his father works nights at the bookstore. Surveying his situation, he notes, “I know there are people out there who got it worse than we do, but there’s people who got it better, too. A lot better, and they’re probably not even working as hard” (11). While Bunny’s plan for lifting his family out of poverty relies on his ambition and work ethic, his family’s situation shows that personal responsibility is not enough to guarantee success. Despite his father’s hard work, his bookstore is failing; though it is a community pillar, it has also been robbed. Additionally, while Bunny is extremely disciplined, his dream of becoming a pro basketball player will ultimately boil down to luck.

Nasir and his family are in the most comfortable financial position of the Whitman characters. However, his cousin Wallace is suffering from the combined effects of poverty and gentrification. Nasir observes the way Wallace lives—he sleeps on a dingy couch in his grandmother’s one-bedroom apartment, which is infested with roaches. It lacks hot water, so Wallace showers at Nasir’s apartment. His mother and father are both absent, lost to drugs and crime. When he is injured from getting punched in the nose by an enraged creditor, he informs Nasir that he can’t go to the hospital because he has no health insurance. Chief among his immediate concerns is the imminent eviction of him and his grandmother, who are being forced out of the neighborhood she has lived in for decades due to rising rent. In an ironic moment, Nasir’s father mentions that Wallace’s grandmother marched to Selma with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This demonstrates that despite decades of progress for African Americans, many of them are still struggling with circumstances not much better than they experienced in the 1960s. Additionally, Wallace’s suffering sits at the intersection of multiple policies enacted in the US since the 1970s: mass incarceration, the War on Drugs, and administrations that slashed social programs like welfare, Social Security, and Medicaid.

Physical suffering and lack of safety are not the only effects of lower-class life. The teens in the novel all cope with the accumulated emotional toll, albeit in different ways. Bunny feels enormous pressure to succeed, Nasir feels responsible for helping his cousin, and Wallace experiences the rage and desperation of accumulated stress from problems he is ill-equipped to solve. Although he usually chooses the worst course of action from a list of possibilities, it is possible that even if he had chosen more wisely, he still wouldn’t have been able to improve his situation. For example, when Nasir recommends he find a job and goes out with him to fill out applications, Wallace finally tells him that flipping burgers is “not about to pay any real bills, man, and you know it” (138). Although Nasir tells him to stop making excuses, Wallace is probably right about that—the minimum wage when After the Shot Drops was published was $7.25 an hour and hadn’t been increased since 2009. Without legitimate options to pay his bills, Wallace feels compelled to turn to illegal gambling, which, while dangerous, has the potential to be lucrative. His turn to violent crime and incarceration shows how the poverty cycle continues; Wallace will likely be trapped for the rest of his life.

The ways financial precarity intersects with race is another main theme of the novel. Two of the main characters, Bunny and Wallace, are Black; Nasir is mixed race, being half Black and half Filipino. At several points in the novel, the problems associated with financial stress are compounded by discrimination against the teens’ Black cultural background.

Of the characters, Bunny experiences this most acutely by traversing two different worlds: Whitman, with its slumlords, homelessness, crime, and lack of resources, and St. Sebastian’s, where the students are overwhelmingly wealthy and white. Bunny experiences a sense of deep belonging to his community while also feeling the need to escape it, which is why he is so disciplined and transfers to St. Sebastian’s in the first place. At St. Sebastian’s however, he experiences a constant sense of alienation from his peers, who fail to recognize the pressure he faces as a Black person with limited financial means. For example, he feels the need to modulate his speech patterns and talk more “white,” although he occasionally slips by using slang terms such as “real rap” (26). He also mentions to Brooke that at Whitman, students also wear a uniform—khaki pants and a purple polo shirt—probably to ensure students don’t wear gang colors to school. She laughs, thinking it is a joke, but Bunny is being sincere. The students at St. Sebastian’s are unable to grasp the reality of gang violence and the presence of violent crime, which is not uncommon in Bunny’s neighborhood. This is evidenced by the shooting death of his classmate Gabe in Chapter 1.

The combined stressors of race and class discrimination are illustrated clearly when Bunny walks home through one of St. Sebastian’s surrounding neighborhoods after a party. Surrounded by opulence, Bunny remembers when police stopped him in this neighborhood because they suspected him of stealing a car. Bunny was already alienated by his lack of wealth, and this instance of racial profiling illustrates the risks he faces as a Black adolescent in a white space; because of his race, the police assumed he was a criminal.

During the tour of St. Sebastian’s with Nasir, Bunny opens up to him about his difficulty managing his outsider status: “If I speak too ‘Black’…then they’re going to put me in some box in their minds, and I’m going to have to fight even harder to work my way out. If I change it up too much and don’t speak ‘Black’ enough, then I feel like I’m being fake” (166). For Bunny, the only way to adapt to this new environment is to lose part of himself. When Nasir asks him why he cares so much about what others think, Bunny responds, “The fact that you have to ask that question means you don’t really understand how it feels” (166). Although Nasir is mixed race himself, he has the benefit of a home environment that understands him. It is evident in the novel that Black teens incur additional psychological stress when moving through spaces that discriminate against them due to their race, economic class, or both.