The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas serves as a parallel to the current events in United States of America. Through the perspective of the main character, Starr, it provides a glimpse into how police brutality in African American communities impacts individuals and their families.
The story gives voice to issues of racism and classism through the lived experience of the main character. Starr lives in an primarily African American neighborhood, however she attends a predominately Caucasian preparatory school. On a daily basis she struggles with internal conflicts related to her identity and self acceptance. While the book may seem to embody the essence of the Black Lives Matter movement, it is also a story that deals with a teenage girl coming of age in a time where she must grapple with issues far beyond her years.
The Hate U Give is relevant in that far too many African American and Latina/Latino teens and young adults have been affected by the death of loved ones, due to police brutality. The book showcases a main character that feels the uncertainty of her future and wonders if she can make a difference in a world that does not seem to value her life or that of people who look like her. Many teens will find that this story resonates with their own personal experience.
The Hate U Give is a novel inspired by Black Lives Matter, which is a movement formed in response to violence targeted at black individuals and communities. The main character in the story, Starr Carter, witnesses a police officer shoot her friend Khalil, who is a young, unarmed black male. The remainder of the book explores the tragedy's effects on Starr and her community, and the shooting parallels many well-publicized instances of police officers shooting young, unarmed black men.
The 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin by neighborhood watch coordinator George Zimmerman brought the issue of racism in policing to the attention of many Americans, via both news media and social media. The police killings of Terence Crutcher, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Walter Scott are notable examples of this type of violence occurring in the three years prior to the book's February 2017 release.
The social injustice highlighted in The Hate U Give continues to be relevant as we see athletes kneel while the national anthem is played before sporting events. American quarterback Colin Kaepernick famously began this protest in 2016 by kneeling before NFL games to protest social injustice towards African Americans.
Angie Thomas's The Hate U Give is extremely relevant to current events in the United States. In the story, Starr Carter is a black teenage girl who attends a high school with a mostly white student body but lives in poor, mostly black neighborhood. When her friend Khalil, a black boy her age, is shot by the police for seemingly no reason, her world is turned upside down. The author actually started her work on the story in response to real-life events in the year 2009, when an young, unarmed black man named Oscar Grant was shot by a white police officer after already having been restrained.
This book is undeniably Black Lives Matter-centered. The Black Lives Matter movement is one that has recently swept the world of activism in the US, and was started up mainly in response to the events surrounding the shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2012 (Martin was not shot by a member of police, but by George Zimmerman, who followed and shot the unarmed black teenager while he was walking home one night). You may have also heard of Mike Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice, who were all victims of police shootings and brutality in the past few years. Angie Thomas takes the time in her book to point out that these shootings are intrinsically part of a cycle of violence, poverty, and racial prejudice that many black communities and individuals in the US face. If you research this or listen to the news, you will see that shootings like this happen frequently in the US.
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