The Hate U Give: BLM Gets The Novel Treatment

Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, The Hate U Give follows Starr Carter as her life is turned inside out when she witnesses her best friend’s murder at the hands of the police. It is not an emotionally easy read, but at points that is because of the unevenness of the treatment of the central moments as much as it is because of the heartfelt pain of police extrajudicial killings. The Hate U Give, the debut novel by Angie Thomas, has three strong scenes. The first puts you inside the car during a police stop for DWB (claimed as the old standby of “a broken tail light”) gone wrong. The anxiety and tension in this scene immediately called up every emotion I’ve felt during a traffic stop. The shift from a night like any other to the worst and last night of a Black boy’s life punches in with such abrupt fury, it leaves you reeling. We, the readers, are Starr Carter kneeling on the asphalt, immobilized by fear, watching her friend bleed to death, and facing down a nervous white cop with his finger on the trigger. The unforgettable video of Diamond Reynolds held at gunpoint while her boyfriend, Phillando Castile, slowly bleeds out in the front seat is surely burned in our collective memories. This early scene captures that hopeless, helpless fear in devastating clarity. [quote_right]We, the readers, are Starr Carter kneeling on the asphalt, immobilized by fear…[/quote_right] The second strong scene is a police interrogation disguised as the making of a report about the i…