Ready, blame, FIRE
A hit novel for young adults pushes a false narrative about the police and gun violence in America
‘AS we continue to fight the battle against police brutality and systemic racism in America, [this is] a muchneeded literary ramrod.”
That’s the first blurb on the back of Angie Thomas’ “The Hate U Give,” a young-adult novel that has topped the New York Times bestseller list for the third week in a row. Although the novel is beautifully written and far surpasses most of the literature in this genre, it is exactly the ramrod that young people do not need right now.
Starr Carter is a 16-year-old black girl growing up in a working-class family in the inner city while at- tending a private mostly white school in the suburbs. Fleeing gunshots at a party one night, an old friend, Khalil, offers to drive her home. After they are pulled over by police, Khalil is shot in the back by an officer and Starr is the sole witness. The book follows Starr as she deals with the grief of his death, her guilt that she could not have done more to help him and her anger over the lack of punishment for the officer. The book also follows the Black Lives Matter narrative — that innocent, even angelic, unarmed black teenage boys are regularly murdered by racist police officers and that no one is held accountable when they do.
But of course that is not reality. According to the Chicago Tribune’s crime database, for instance, there were 4,368 shootings in Chicago last year. Most of the victims and perpetrators were black, and 99 percent of the shootings were carried out by civilians. Of those carried out by police, many were in self-defense or to protect bystanders. Moreover, despite the rhetoric about how police are targeting blacks, a Harvard study last year of 1,000 police-involved shootings found no evidence of racial bias. In fact, white police officers were less likely than black officers to shoot black civilians.
Thomas is a novelist, and there is nothing that compels her to reflect statistical realities with her work. But in an interview with Cosmopolitan, she claims the book holds up a “window” or a “mirror” for young people. It is in that role that she is performing a tremendous disservice to young people who will read her work and assume that thousands of innocent black men are filling our cemeteries each year because of police actions.
Thomas at least makes some attempt to suggest that not all police officers are bad. Starr’s Uncle Carlos is a member of the force. But he is portrayed as hopelessly naive about the behavior of his fellow officers.
And then there is Khalil himself. At first, it is assumed Khalil is a thug because, well, he is dealing drugs. But, of course, Khalil was only selling drugs to protect his mom from a gangbanger she stole from, working to repay her debt. There is no explanation for why the officer shot him, other than he mistook a hairbrush for a handgun.
While it is true that this kind of mistake has been made in other police shootings, as in the 1999 case of Amadou Diallo, the case of Michael Brown, who is invoked in the final pages of “The Hate U Give” is entirely different. Caught on video robbing a store just before police nabbed him, he also attacked an officer and was finally shot dead while resisting arrest. Not even a Justice Department led by Eric Holder found fault with the police officer’s actions.
But Starr assumes the officer who shot Khalil will never be brought to justice because of a corrupt system. And the novel proves her right. Meanwhile, officers like the ones involved in the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore
been charged with murder. Throughout “The Hate UGive,” we learn that police will do whatever they can to protect their own. At one point when a brick is thrown through the window of Starr’s apartment and gunshots are fired, her parents debate whether it’s the work of the police trying to intimidate Starr or whether it’s a local drug kingpin who has it in for her father. In the real world, one of these scenarios is significantly more likely.
To Thomas’ credit, she does not shy away from showing the crime that families like Starr’s encounter every day. There is a constant backdrop of warring gangs, domestic abuse, drive-by shootings, robberies and drug dealing. But the book’s lesson is that even the people who are engaged in criminal behavior are doing so because of forces outside of their control.
“The Hate U Give” has been received with universal praise and, in the coming years, will inevitably become required reading in high schools and colleges across America. When that happens, students will get a kind of fictional confirmation of the narrative that they hear from the academic left, the media and guilty white liberals about the racist country they inhabit. Whether or not that was the intention of Angie Thomas, it will likely be her legacy.