Engaging works by artists including Deana Lawson, Arthur Jafa, Kahlil Joseph, Dawoud Bey, Okwui Okpokwasili, Simone Leigh, and Luke Willis Thompson, Campt argues that these artist's practices require "viewers to do more than simply look... solicit visceral responses to the visualization of Black precarity."  The book has been hailed by Art in America as “a methodological offering a theory of what Blackness brings to making and viewing art, and to perception in general.”