In her next book, On The Come Up, Thomas introduces readers to 16-year-old Bri, a female rapper who lives in a poor neighborhood adjacent to Garden Heights.
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"I've had children of white supremacists who said that it opened their eyes and it helped change them and that was amazing to me, you know? In Mississippi, one gentleman - his family was part of the cover-up with the Emmett Till case - and he watched the movie and it opened his eyes and he sobbed through the whole thing because he realized the error in his ways and his family's ways." "I definitely had a lot of people tell me that the book has changed their perspective and opened their minds and their hearts," Thomas says. The story is all-too-familiar to anyone who has kept up with the news in recent years, but by hyper-focusing on one case and one girl, Thomas is able to create a story that demands empathy of its readers in order to be understood. But if she doesn't, she could help a white police officer get away with murder. Suddenly, Starr faces a tough decision: If she testifies against the white police officer who shot Khalil, she risks incurring the wrath of a neighborhood gang leader and the scorn of her white classmates. Starr code-switches between her two selves to maintain her identity in both spheres, but her worlds collide violently when she witnesses her friend Khalil killed by a white police officer. The Hate U Give centers on the experiences of 16-year-old black teenager Starr (Amandla Stenberg) who lives in the poor black neighborhood of Garden Heights but attends a predominantly white private school, Williamson Prep, where she has a white boyfriend (KJ Apa of CW's Riverdale) and a slew of white friends.
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, $18.99, Amazon or Indiebound The book draws its name from a Tupac Shakur lyric - "The Hate U Give Little Infants F*cks Everybody" - a line that becomes pivotal to the action of the story. In the years that followed, more and more black boys, teens and men were killed by police officers - Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice - and Thomas decided to expand the story into a novel.
Thomas first began writing The Hate U Give as a short story in her senior year at Belhaven University, as a response to the 2009 police shooting of Oscar Grant. "Especially people who don't have to have that talk with their kids about just how powerful this is and then how dangerous it is and just what type of knowledge young black kids have to be armed with nowadays just to survive." "I hope that it really hits home for a lot of people," Thomas tells Bustle.
Author Angie Thomas tells Bustle that scene was decided upon by she, director George Tillman Jr., and screenwriter Audrey Wells in the very beginning stages of adapting her #1 New York Times bestselling novel for the screen. He, like all black parents, knows that his children are probably never more in danger than when in the presence of those who "keep the peace." It's a gut-punch of a scene, and one that immediately sets the tone for the movie, a heart-wrenching account of the personal and political costs of police brutality.
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The movie adaptation of The Hate U Give begins with a talk: Maverick Carter sits down with his children - the story's protagonist, Starr, and her two brothers - to talk through The Black Panther Party's Ten-Point Program and instruct them on how to respond if they get pulled over by police.