Two nights ago, on Wednesday, April 12, my husband Charles and I watched a Blu-Ray disc of one of the finest recent movies I’ve seen in some time. It was called The Hate U Give and it was directed by George Tillman, Jr. (a Black filmmaker whose career dates back to a self-financed indie called Scenes for the Soul in 1994 and a major-studio feature called Soul Food two years later) based on a script by Audrey Wells adapted from a young-adult novel of the same name by Angie Thomas. Thomas was inspired by the shooting of yet another unarmed Black man, Oscar Grant, by police at a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station in Oakland, California, The Hate U Give got its title from a rap song by the late Tupac Shakur, with the letter ”U” instead of “you” so the title would form the acronym “THUG.” The story concerns a 16-year-old Black girl named Starr Carter, whois growing up in the fictional ghetto community of Garden Heights (neither Thomas nor Wells specify in what city or state Garden Heights is, thereby giving the story a kind of Everytown setting, as if to say this could be happening anywhere in the U.S. there is a sizable Black population).
She’s the middle child of parents Maverick “Mav” Carter (Russell Hornsby) and his wife Lisa (Regina Hall). Her older and younger siblings are both boys, and Mav has given all his kids empowering names: his oldest son is called Seven (Lamar Johnson), which Mav explains means “perfection,” while Starr means “light” (despite the extra “r”) and her younger brother is called Sekani (TJ Wright), meaning “joy.” Mav owns a grocery store bought for him by King (Anthony Mackie), the head of the King Lords, the local drug gang who have terrorized the law-abiding residents of Garden Heignts into submission and silence. King bought Mav the store after Mav took a three-year prison sentence for a crime King committed, and in order to keep them away from ghetto influences Mav is paying their tuition for a mostly white private school in the nearby neighborhood of Williamson. In one of the periodic bits of first-person narration by Starr that punctuate the film, Starr explains that the public high school is a factory for producing drug dealers, drug addicts and people with STD’s and pregnancies. But the private school has led her to adopt a whole different persona, which she called “Williamson me” as opposed to “Garden Heights me.” “Williamson me” is a polite Black girl who avoids ghetto ways and ghetto slang – even while her trendier white classmates are embracing Blkack slang, much to Starr’s embarrassment – while “Garden Heights me” is a more authentic version of herself but only because around her own people she doesn’t have to work so hard at maintaining the image of the “good Black girl.”
Starr is also caught between two potential boyfriends: a white boy named Chris (K. J. Apa) who’s a classmate at Williamson and a Black man named Khalil (Algee Smith) whom she’s known since childhood. Khalil takes Starr to a party which gets raided by people with guns – thugs, not cops – and Khalil and Starr flee the party in his car. Only Khalil gets stopped by police and, rather than follow the rules Mav had taught Starr to avoid getting shot by the local police – always keep your hands ont he dashboard, politely show them your I.D. and be as submissive as possible – Khalil reacts as a normal human being would with indignation and bravado. A white cop who was one of the two officers that stopped him sees him reach back into the car after the officer had ordered him out of it. Khalil reaches for a hairbrush, and the officer shoots him and later claims he thought Khalil was reaching for a gun. Starr was the only witness to Khalil’s shooting, and she’s under a lot of pressure from her parents from the gang and from the police to keep quiet about it, but April Ofrah (Isaa Rae), a powerful Black woman lawyer representing an organization called Just Us for Justice, comes to town and persuades Starr to give an interview to a local TV station. Though the station agrees to put a voice filter on her and blur her face, Starr nonetheless talks about not only what she actually saw when Khalil was shot, but how she was interrogated by the cops and asked about Khalil’s past as a drug dealer (she concedes he was one but said he only got into that because it was the only available employment for young Black men in the town, referencing the point Malcolm X made in his autobiography that there were plenty of young Blacks with entrepreneurial potential but, because Blacks were denied equal access to capital, had to do so through illegal rather than legal businesses) rather than what the cop did to him, and she also denounces the King Lords and their grip of terror they have on the Garden Heights neighborhood.
This predictably enrages King, who threatens Mav and his entire family and ultimately has one of his thugs throw a Molotov cocktail into Mav’s store. One of the things that makes The Hate U Give a great movie is that Wells and Thomas are constantly taking their pilot in different, unexpected and yet believable directions; it’s the sort of movie that you feel watching it as if you’re in good, steady hands and you’re willing to follow the filmmakers wherever they want to take you. There’s an interesting subplot about Starr’s relationship with her white. best friend Hailey (Sabrina Carpenter), one of the white kids who gets off on trying to act “Black” with almost total cluelessness about what being Black really means. Hailey leads a student strike in protest against the murder of Khalil by a local cop, but Starr suspects it’s just an excuse to ditch school on the day of a really tough math test. Later, when Hailey sees a local TV news show interviewing the family of the cop who shot Khalil and expresses sympathy for what they’re going through, Starr goes ballistic on her. In either that scene or a later one, Starr steals a hairbrush out of Hailey’s purse and starts beating her with it, all the while asking, “Is this a gun? Does this look like a gun to you?”
Starr also has an uncle, Carlos (played by Common, one of the better rappers around and co-composer of the theme song from another recent Black-themed masterpiece, Ava DuVernay’s Selma), who showed up at the police station the night the cops took Starr into custody after murdering Khalil and made sure she was released. But Carlos attracts Starr’s (and our) ire by also taking the cop’s side in the argument and admitting that he would treat a Black person he stopped differnetly than a white person who did the same things – an eerie premonition of the beating death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of five Black cops in Memphis, Tennessee on February 2023 (plus a white officer who stood on the sidelines and egged them on). The Hate U Give is a film I would recommend just about everybody see – particularly those Americans who wonder why there’s so much hatred and distrust between the police and the Black community. I also liked it because it doesn’t make the Black community seem more heroic than it is; it acknowledges the presence of drugs and the gangs that supply them and hold the community in the grip of terror – and Starr earns our admiration as much for publicly exposing them and shaming the local cops into doing something about them as she does of telling the truth about what she saw the night Khalil was shot.
In an impromptu street protest as she nervously fingers a bullhorn in preparation for speaking to the crowd and identifying herself publicly as the witness, she muses on its similarity to a gun and says that if the cop who killed Khalil had only had a bullhorn instead of a gun, Khalil would still be alive. The ironies mount as Starr encounters the demonstration in the first place – held to protest the predictable refusal of a grand jury to indict the cop for murder or any other crime for Khalil’s death – when she and her white boyfriend Chris are in Chris’s SUV in their way to the hospital to take her brother Sekani to the emergency room after he’s been beaten within an inch of his life by King’s thug enforcers. The film is full of Black music, not only rap but also some old-school soul like Arlissa’s “We Won’t Move,” heard at the closing credit roll and also the music that plays when you load the disc, and though I ordinarily can’t stand rap it works here, not only as the sort of music the characters would be listening to but also as a running commentary of how, as Tupac put it in the lyric that inspired the title, the hate you give to infants follows them and colors their entire lives. The Hate U Give is a great movie that I would recommend to anyone on whatever side of the racial and cultural issues tha so relentlessly divide our country these days.
