Black Lives Matter: Angie Thomas’s ‘The Hate U Give’
And so turns the final page, again. My third time reading this book, and it remains as affecting as the first.
I don’t know if I’ve ever read anything with as much heart. Despite its premise being centred around a brutal and horrifically familiar injustice, it’s a story suffused with such overwhelmingly soul-soothing warmth. To imagine a world where a parent’s arms are the safest place on Earth, where community is forever more important than the cold and callous self-interest that epitomises its absence, where neighbours are family and family means stability and sanctuary… I’ll be returning to the worlds Angie Thomas crafts again and again for the rest of my life.
This one in particular will also always hold an utterly immutable place in my narrative, a stronghold wrought in the adamantine stuff that dreams are made on, because it was a formative reason for why I entered publishing.
I was midway through my English degree working part-time as both a GCSE tutor and a ground floor bookseller at Waterstones Piccadilly, the biggest bookshop in Europe. And I was stalling slightly over the decision of how to earn money while writing my own stories: accept a grad scheme offer for a business analyst job in Canary Wharf (soul-destroying), attempt to break into journalism, pivot to pursuing astrophysics and my earliest childhood passion bar only writing, move back to Glasgow and explore opportunities in the arts closer to home, continue working as a bookseller while applying for Masters degrees, or embark on the journey towards something else entirely like anti-discrimination law or international relations or renewable energy.
And then The Hate U Give happened, and I experienced an era-defining publishing phenomenon in the muddiest trenches of the front lines. I witnessed and participated in the tempestuous conversion of the potential into the kinetic as a single story written by an author an ocean away swept the globe and galvanised a generation, instilling in me a profound and deeply radicalising sense of something Brit Marling said once: “As time has passed, I’ve come to understand what deep influence shaping a narrative has. Stories inspire our actions. They frame for us existences that are and are not possible, delineate tracks we can or cannot travel. They choose who we can find empathy for and who we cannot. What we have fellow feeling for, we protect. What we objectify and commodify, we eventually destroy.”
I fell in love with the forge.
On the last page of this novel there is a list of names: Oscar, Aiyana, Trayvon, Rekia, Michael, Eric, Tamir, John, Ezell, Sandra, Freddie, Alton, Philando, Emmett.
Not only was that list merely a fragment of one infinitely longer and horrifyingly unknowable, that full stop every reader prayed would remain a full stop instead became yet another comma, followed by yet more names: Stephon, Botham, Atatiana, Rayshard, Daniel, Breonna, George.
Silence won’t end it, scrolling won’t end it, hashtags won’t end it, black squares won’t end it.
We need to put in the fucking work, bring our outrage and our activism into every conceivable corner of our respective worlds, and live forever by Starr’s parting words:
I’ll never forget.
I’ll never give up.
I’ll never be quiet.
I promise.
