The Hate U Give

By: Arinjay Basak

The Hate You Give, written by Angie Thomas, is a fictional novel about the life of Starr Carter, a 16 year old black girl living in the ghetto. Gangs, shootouts, drugs, prostitutes, and violence are all commonplace in the neighborhood, primarily inhabited by black residents. The general area being unsafe, she attends school an hour’s drive away, and is one of the few black students in a school with mainly a very rich, white demographic. The racial and financial contrast with her poor black suburbs leads her to create a front, in which she consciously doesn’t use slang, and carefully sounds out her syllables around her school in an attempt to not stand out in school. 

One night, leaving a party after hearing gunshots, Starr and her childhood friend Khalil are pulled over by a police officer, and Starr witnesses Khalil unjustly killed by the police brutality she had been warned about from her parents. Most of the kids in the hood were warned how to deal with cops: keep hands visible, don’t make sudden movements, and do what the cop says without talkback. Khalil, making a gesture to see if Starr was alright, moves his hand towards a hairbrush, which the cop mistakes for a gun. The only witness is Starr, but having had one of her close friends shot and killed in front of her once before, the PTSD and emotional stress takes a toll on her, causing her to have breakdowns and cry a lot more. After giving the honest story of how the incident went in an interview with the police, Starr realizes how skewed the media, law, and general public is in terms of finding the truth and justice in these cases. Finding out Khalil was a drug dealer, the media jumps on this, fabricating a story of the cop being afraid, and Khalil being hostile. This dehumanizes Khalil for everyone in the general public and even Starr herself, unable to believe he would take part in dealing something that took his mother away from him. Later, she learns he was forced to deal drugs to pay back the kingpin of a prominent gang to save the addicted mother who did nothing for him. Starr becomes critical of herself, and her white schoolmates who take the media at face value and sympathize with the cop.
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The Hate You Give is cleverly written so the reader is given a view of both the boonies and the affluent white families, and can see how differently they react to the media. The minorities that are subjected to unjust treatment by higher authorities and the law have been statistically shown to indicate racism from the officers that take part in these incidents. The media has been shown to dehumanize the victims of these cases, tending to go more in depth of how the police officer suffers from the shock of murdering someone in the moment. This happens because the police officer tends to have a stronger voice than the minority. For example, after Starr told her Uncle Carson the cop had his gun trained on Starr after killing Khalil till help came, Carson beat the officer up, which was highlighted in the news more than the fact Khalil was unarmed. The story is written from Starr’s point of view, so it’s bound to be biassed, but ideally this case comes down to 2 voices that should be in court. Here, the police officer fabricated a sob story to win over the media, and Starr didn’t have the opportunity to speak out. Of course, she might have lied about the incident, villainizing the cop to the media, but the voices deserve equal amounts of attention. These violent police brutality cases have a defendant, but need a prosecutor with a voice, or the protests won’t stop, and justice won’t come.