First Lines: The Hate U Give

What’s the point of having a voice if you’re gonna be silent?

Starr, a sixteen-year old girl and her friend get pulled over by a cop, and he gets shot. She wants justice for him. But he was black, and possibly a drug dealer, or a gang member, or both. But wanting justice and getting it, are two entirely different things. So, she has to ask herself, “What’s the point of having a voice if you’re gonna be silent?”

Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give is an incredibly now book. It deals with #BlackLivesMatter, police brutality, race and racism, finding out who you are, and while it gave me the all the right feels and messages and pushed all the buttons that should make me go, “well, this is quite excellent,” it didn’t quite connect.

At this point, I was going to make an ass of myself by sounding incredibly white, explaining that, for me, this book might just have been a bit too ‘black,’ with all its black slang (“black people don’t talk like that all time, do they?”), black hip-hop-rap-pop-culture references (the title is derived from a Tupac song), black Jesus, black power and black this and black that. And then I saw Spike Lee’s most excellent BlacKkKlansman, and I decided that, no, my pretty white ass just needed some kicking.

Because knowing you live your life on the lowest difficulty setting is one thing, but not being an ass about it is something else altogether.

Book read
Angie Thomas — The Hate U Give
First line
I shouldn’t have come to this party.