Daunte Wright, Andre Hill, Manuel Ellis, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Stephon Clark, and so on. You may have heard these names when you’re flicking through the BBC or whatever news outlets you switch on to when you’re kicking off home on your couch. What does it say? Study the language of the news. There is no such thing as objective news and as readers, we should see right through the bias. But it’s difficult. If you don’t recognise at least some of these names, you should: they’re the fallen victims of American police brutality. They’re all black.
I think overtime, Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give will become an important text in the young adult sphere, and in a more significant sphere, American literature. There has been a multitude of voices from black voices, but in more recent memory, none have captured the absurdity of race in America as Thomas had with her work. This is not Stockett lending a black voice because she had a black maid at one point, the thought irks me; The Hate U Give comes from a real place, where Thomas when young was no stranger to gun violence, and she is an aficionado of the hip hop culture, being a rapper herself when she was younger.
Tupac’s unborn daughter comes to life
Starr is a fifteen year old black girl at a spring break party in her neighbourhood. She doesn’t really goes to these sorts of things, earlier on we may spot her as a recluse, but she’s with good company as her half-sister Kenya dragged her along so she can start a petty fight with a competing love interest to hers, some dude called DeVante. A shot rang out in the party, and Starr barely escaped with her childhood friend and first love, Khalil.
On the way home, the police stopped them for a broken taillight, and in a mass of confusion, the police with badge number 115 shot Khalil as he headed back to his car. Starr, losing her close friend, instantly became the main witness to another leaf of American police brutality. The fact that she’s under scholarship to a mostly white, elite school doesn’t help either. She cannot connect to her friends when they talk about their holidays, as her highlight was going to the local swimming pool instead of bronzing in Jamaica. And no, none of these kids seemed to care, not even in passing that a black kid had died shot by the police just around the corner. Shit like that happens every day.
The tensions grew as she reported the events to the police, who seem to only want to feed words to her mouth and framed the issue as though they are helping society by killing a drug dealer. But there are other voices who wanted her to speak up, and ultimately, she will profess to the grand jury in giving her evidence, which will determine the outcome if the police in question will be put to trial or not. But tensions are ever-rising. The police see her and her family as a target when they find that she was the witness in question, and Starr must move outside of her comfort zone to find her voice, despite the consequences.
A young adult classic, time will tell whether this will be a future classic
Daunte Wright, Andre Hill, Manuel Ellis, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Stephon Clark, and so on. The 2010s were notorious for police brutality and slaying of unarmed black civilians, The Hate U Give is the fruit of these accumulating anger, and though the voices of Black Lives Matter have been loud enough for a few heads to turn, there is an imperative that these voices are present in other mediums, especially in literature.
The success of THUG is proof that the majority are interested in these voices, that they know there is something inherently wrong with the system and that perhaps to lend an ear to these voices is the first step to changing things.
And though THUG is a young adult book, the scope of it is ambitious. It covers a lot of ground on race relations in America. Starr is the perfect vehicle for this discourse, as she is a young person who are still in the transitionary period to make her own opinions about race in her country of birth — how much of her parents opinions would she take in (for example, her father’s “talk” whenever she is in a situation where a police officer approaches her), how should she treat her white boyfriend, Chris (how much of his class and race matter in relation to her identity), the silence of the white “others” when Khalil was murdered, including her close friends and fellow students.
For Starr, it is the matter of finding her own voice, as much as black America must find her own voice as she had been trying since the times of slavery. And it is a difficult fight. And it is an important fight. It is the fight to influence others to question news stories, and to look deeper into the lives lost before we make assumptions. What are the motivations of a drug dealer to become one — was there any other choice? Why is black America so eternally apprehensive of the largely ignorant white America? Yes, that was a loaded question. Can we find a middle ground?
THUG is also a homage to African American everyday culture — the routines, the music — of which the latter is adapted by the author as the title of the book: a line from Tupac that “The hate u give little infants fucks everybody”, hence THUG LIFE. There are such vignettes to give the juxtaposition between the underprivileged life of black America and its counterpart white America, for at times it is difficult not to talk about the former without comparing it to the latter. Yet, it is difficult for white America not to be influenced by black America — the music, the fashion, the sports, embodied and professed in Chris’s tastes.
It is a book which attacks passive racism, not just to African Americans but to minorities in general. This is perfectly portrayed in the uneasy relationship between Starr, her Asian friend Maya and her white blonde frenemy Hailey, representative perhaps of the ignorant and passively racist white America. When during a game of basketball, the frustrated Hailey told Starr to chase the ball like fried chicken, the incensed Starr walked out of court. Hailey’s response was to gaslight her, remarking that she couldn’t believe that Starr called her out for being racist. She made a similar comment to Maya, asking her if her family cooks a cat instead of turkeys for thanksgiving. Hailey is the more extreme example, but there seems an unbridgeable gulf between the two sides.
THUG is not without its flaws. There are some scenes which made me cringe, just as most young adult books would, such as the romance with its typical YA cheese doused generally (add to it a rather complicated love triangle with Starr, the white boy boyfriend and the G young drug dealer trying to get out of the business), and how “black” Chris had to prove himself. Besides Chris, the presence of white America is pervasive, combative, and perhaps too much so.
Regardless of these flaws, I think that it is an important text, especially to young adults forming their own opinions about race relations whether you are black, white or in between. It’s not really my voice to talk about life as a black person, but I read because I want to be taken to these lives. Fiction does this much, much better than reports, and it has to come from a very real place.
