The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As I read this book, through all the thoughts it provoked and emotions it evoked, one stood out: perspective makes so much difference. The Hate U Give shares a perspective that everyone needs to understand.

Anyone who pays attention to recent books has heard of The Hate U Give since it's won numerous awards over the last year or so. That's how it got on my to-read list, and I can confidently say that Angie Thomas deserves every last one of those awards and more.

The Hate U Give tells the story of Starr, a black teenage girl who is witness to the shooting of her black friend by a white cop. It's fiction, but unfolds pretty much like innumerable real-world news stories. Media coverage slanted against the victim, police looking for excuses more than facts, district attorney unable or unwilling to push through indictments, violent protests in reaction...it's all happened in the news recently, repeatedly. What you don't see in the news is how it looks to a girl who lives in the world where the victim lived, who was there for the crime, and who lived through the aftermath. Thomas brings that perspective to life.

Beyond the commentary on current events, Thomas explores all kinds of aspects of Starr's life and that of her friends and family. Complicated family relationships, teenage angst over school and the opposite sex, living with gang violence, annoying younger siblings, fear of the police, sneaker fashion...everything from the profound to the banal is part of the story. It all works together to help the reader understand Starr's actions and feelings.

I'm a white man from the suburbs, with basically no common frame of reference with Starr. The Hate U Give let me see the world from her point of view. That kind of empathy isn't easy to create, and Thomas deserves a ton of credit for doing a masterful job at it.

Perhaps the hardest part of reading this book was seeing myself in the story. Starr's boyfriend Chris, who is white and comes from a privileged background, struggles to understand how she feels about all kinds of things, from food to the lack of justice for her friend. Some of that is the usual teenage battle-of-the-sexes confusion but much of it is his lack of knowledge about Starr's culture. I've been there. The media coverage focuses on the victim's drug connections, making it seem that he deserved his fate. I've been guilty of thinking that way when a similar news story comes to my attention. This kind of thing happened throughout the book, giving me reason to think about my own instinctive reactions and what bias they hold.

I said above that everyone needs to understand the perspective in this book. I'm glad that The Hate U Give is so popular, since that spreads its message more widely. I hope it reaches people who, like me, normally wouldn't think that this is their kind of story. Because empathy for the people outside of our own experience important to all of us.