Confronting the Center: Exposing Systemic Racism and Whiteness through The Hate U Give

Abstract

Tupac Shakur’s tattoo THUG LIFE, an acronym forming the phrase ‘The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody,’ serves as the title for Angie Thomas’s debut Young Adult (YA) novel The Hate U Give. The rapper’s refined interpretation of the term simultaneously out-lines the central theme of the text: Exploring how systemic racism affects the upbringing and socialization of Black children and subsequently society as a whole. Starr Carter, the sixteen-year-old protagonist, narrates how her life unfolds after becoming the sole witness as her friend Khalil is shot by a white police officer. The narrative confronts forms of systemic racism, such as police brutality, one-sided media representations and microaggressions directed at Starr and her community. Through Starr’s perspective The Hate U Give confronts racism and marginalization by offering what Rudine Sims Bishop (1990) has called “Mirrors, Windows and Sliding Glass Doors.” These concepts enable reflection of familiar, but also unfamiliar viewpoints and an engagement with the representation of such fictional worlds. The highly empathic and topical novel depicts Starr within her Black community (Garden Heights) and in the almost exclusively white context of her private high school. Her navigation of these spaces as a young Black American woman relates to the concepts of “double consciousness” (DuBois) and “triple consciousness” (Welang), which Starr describes as “flipping the switch in [her] brain.” Starr’s triple-marginalization necessitates an elaborate form of linguistic and cultural code-switching depending on her respective environment and interlocutors. The trauma in the wake of Khalil’s shooting foregrounds Starr’s contention with race and racial stereotypes, turns her into an advocate for Black Lives Matter, and empathically offers mirroring and understanding to a YA and adult readership. The novel enables an analysis of the racialized structures and stereotypes that (young) Black people are confronted with, oftentimes resulting in marginalization, discrimination and violence, topics which lend an uncanny immediacy to Thomas’s YA novel.