The titular Black kid, Ashley, is a rich girl attending a fancy, mostly-white public school in the LA suburbs, and the girls in her friend group are all white. One, Heather, is Jewish, which makes her thing she's hip to oppression that gives her a pass to say racist things. The friends are clueless and shallow, but still somehow written with depth, as are all of the characters. Ashley's parents wanted to give her and her sister Jo (named after Josephine Baker) a better life than they had, but in doing so have kept them sheltered. When Rodney King is brutalized without consequences for the cops, and the city erupts in riots, Ashley eventually begins to recognize her own Blackness. She also realizes how much she has missed by not doing so sooner.

Some scenes from 1992

Bill Cosby appears via a prerecorded PSA and tells the rioters to stop what they're doing and watch the final episode of the Cosby Show on NBC. And I know everybody loves Cosby because Dr. Huxtable and Jell-O or whatever, but it's condescending as hell.

She said, "We have to walk around being perfect all the time just to be seen as human. Don't you ever get tired of being a symbol? Don't you ever just want to be human?"

"You don't go rushing into chaos. You're girls. Pretty girls. Spoiled girls. We made you that way. You act like you know everything, but you have zero street smarts. You could've been hurt, or killed."
"We're already hurt." Jo sighs.

The newscasters bemoan the fate of several architecturally significant buildings that perished or were damaged in the flames.

Referring to the Tulsa Massacre

A bunch of the black men, World War I vets, decided to go protect the black kid from being lynched, so instead of lynching the one boy, the white folks decided to lynch the entire goddamn city.

Ashley's dad refers to Tulsa as a pogrom, which is accurate.