Read through a Marxist lens, Ghost Boys stages police violence not only as racism but as an instrument that polices the boundaries of labor and disposability. Jerome's death after being mistaken for a threat while holding a toy gun can be read as the symbolic removal of a potential future laborer from a system that already treats Black life as expendable; the novel ties that removal to the long history represented by Emmett Till, suggesting continuity between the slave economy's property logic and contemporary modes of social reproduction. The text links intimate family poverty, the neighborhood's precariousness, and the swift elimination of Jerome to show how state power and racial capitalism intersect to regulate who is allowed to come of age and be economically useful. This take encourages students to locate scenes of material precarity and institutional decision making in the novel: the limited economic options visible in Jerome's neighborhood, the quick assumptions of criminality that precede formal legal processes, and the absence of structural remedies when a state actor kills a child. A Marxist reading opens questions about which social relations are preserved by violent policing and which are sacrificed, using Jerome's fate as an instance of how capital and state coercion produce social death in order to maintain labor hierarchies.

A feminist reading, attentive to Black feminist and womanist thought, centers the emotional, political, and unpaid labor that Black women perform in the novel. Jerome's mother and sister bear the work of mourning, speaking, and organizing in the wake of his death; their grief is not private but deeply social, and Rhodes stages their labor as essential to both family survival and the possibility of public testimony. The novel pushes readers to examine how patriarchal institutions fail to protect Black children, while Black women keep community memory alive through storytelling, advocacy, and care. This take emphasizes scenes where female family members translate private grief into public action and care, and it asks students to chart how gender shapes the response to violence. A womanist approach also invites discussion of resilience as political strategy, the moral labor expected of grieving women, and how the novel puts emotional intelligence and relational repair at the center of resistance.

Through Jerome's encounter with Emmett Till, Ghost Boys enacts a postcolonial genealogy of racial terror that stretches from the legal violence of slavery, through lynching, to modern policing. The spectral meetings are not merely supernatural motifs; they are archival interventions that surface suppressed histories and link local tragedy to a global system of racial domination. A postcolonial reading reads these hauntings as evidence that imperial logics persist as social structures, producing ongoing dispossession of Black life even after formal colonial institutions have ended. This interpretation foregrounds how the novel mobilizes memory and testimony to challenge national narratives of progress. By bringing Emmett's ghost into a contemporary context, Rhodes forces readers to see policing as part of a longer, transnational system of racial control. The text thus becomes a site for re-membering, a political archive that insists the past is not past, and that histories of empire and racial terror must be read into the present.

A psychoanalytic reading treats Jerome's ghosthood as a literary dramatization of trauma and the return of the repressed. Jerome's inability, at first, to be seen or heard by the living mirrors how traumatic events are often denied or disavowed by families and institutions. His conversations with Emmett and the other ghost boys function like working-through in psychoanalytic therapy; they allow traumatic memory to be named, witnessed, and integrated into narrative identity. The novel thus shows haunting as a psychic labor that makes trauma legible and available for communal mourning. This take also explores identification and projection: how the living characters, including Jerome's sister, carry fragments of his inner life while struggling to cope publicly. Examining scenes in which Jerome observes his home and family after his death reveals how the psyche responds to sudden loss, and how narrative voice acts as a mechanism for mourning. The psychoanalytic lens foregrounds questions of representation, testimony, and the ethical stakes of witnessing trauma in literature.

A queer theoretical approach reframes the novel's treatment of boyhood, play, and embodiment by attending to the nonnormative temporalities and body politics at work. Jerome's childlike play, including the moment with a toy gun, destabilizes adult categories of threat and responsibility, revealing how policing often enforces a heteronormative, adultified masculinity onto Black boys. Their childhood is foreclosed by violence, producing a queer temporality in which lives end before normative rites of passage can occur. The ghost form itself occupies a queer time, refusing linear life-death chronology and creating space for alternative kinships and modes of intimacy between young boys across generations. This take pushes discussion beyond identity labels to ask how institutions police gendered performance and prematurely adultify children of color. The novel's scenes of play, familial affection, and cross-generational ghostly bonding are ripe for analysis of how queer temporality destabilizes dominant narratives about maturation, propriety, and bodily autonomy. Such a reading invites students to think about how law and culture shape the conditions under which childhood and gender are legible.

A New Historicist approach situates Ghost Boys within the cultural and political moment that shaped its production and reception, reading the novel as both a response to and participant in contemporary debates about race, policing, and curriculum. The deliberate invocation of Emmett Till functions intertextually, connecting the book to historical documents, news cycles, and community activism. Rhodes's narrative choices, from direct address to young readers to scenes that dramatize public mourning, reflect and shape how communities teach and remember racial violence; the text both draws on historical artifacts and contributes to an evolving public archive. This reading asks students to compare the novel's fiction with contemporaneous news reports, legal cases, and movements such as Black Lives Matter, and to consider how literature participates in social change. It also invites inquiry into reception: how has the book been used in classrooms, in activism, and in debates over curriculum? New Historicism treats Ghost Boys not as isolated art but as cultural practice that both reflects and rewrites historical consciousness.