[1][2] The book uses the life of George Floyd and his murder by police officer Derek Chauvin as a lens through which to examine racism in the United States.

Race-related commentary about education housing segregation, incarceration, police brutality and terrorism in the United States is connected to the life of Floyd.

[3] His Name is George Floyd was awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction with the following citation: "An intimate, riveting portrait of an ordinary man whose fatal encounter with police officers in 2020 sparked an international movement for social change, but whose humanity and complicated personal story were unknown.

Andrews approved of the authors' "valiant effort to use Floyd's story to educate society about the ills of structural racism", but suggested that they could have focused on a subject such as Breonna Taylor to draw attention to the lesser covered oppression of Black women in the United States.

However, Mbue criticized that the book could have "more pointedly" highlighted the "hypocrisy of governments and corporations and all manners of institutions" that showed support for the Black Lives Matter movements out of ulterior motives.