Nov 2021 ECD UMW Book Club, "The Hate U Give" by Angie Thomas

The Hate U Give is inspired by THUG LIFE, Tupac Shakur’s famous acronym that stood for “The Hate U Give Little Infants F***ks Everybody.” (Sorry, but this is a family-friendly blog.) It is both a statement that Black lives matter and the story of a 16-year-old girl, Starr Carter, with her own life and problems who is thrust into the spotlight when she accepts a ride home from a party with childhood friend Khalil, only to watch police stop the car and shoot him before her eyes.

Her beloved uncle is a police officer, caught in the middle when she bravely testifies against Officer One-Fifteen, who treated her and her friend abusively before gunning down her friend. Starr, whose mother is a nurse and whose father owns a grocery store in their mostly poor, mostly African-American community, attends a private school in a suburb 45 minutes away and navigates the two very different worlds, serving as a guide to readers through her first person narrative.

Hardly an activist before the shooting (though a picture of Emmett Till’s body that she posted on her Tumbler the previous year led to tension with one school friend), Starr learns both the importance of and the costs of speaking out. Often the cognitive dissonance – she writes, “I hope none of them asks about my spring break. They went to Taipei, the Bahamas, Harry Potter World. I stayed in the hood and saw a cop kill my friend.” – seems too much for her to bear.