Prequel to ‘The Hate U Give’ eviscerates stereotypes about Black families

By Angie Thomas Balzer + Bray. 368 pp. $19.99 - - I will never forget the day I learned that my older cousin was pregnant. I was on the verge of turning 8, and the auntie who shared the news delivered it with this hint of foreboding - like a cautionary tale. Because my cousin was “only” 15.

Fast-forward: It’s 2018. I’m 32, married eight years with two planned-for and deliberately conceived children. I’m visiting an ultra-rich, glaringly White private school to give a talk on my debut novel, “Dear Martin.” I’m standing at the front of a room with 150 (ultra-rich, glaringly White) kids, talking about the connection between systemic racism and implicit bias. And a young woman sitting in the front row raises her hand.

“But what about the illegitimacy rate?” she asks.

“The what now?” I say.

“The illegitimacy rate,” she repeats. “You know: the rate of African American kids who grow up without fathers.”

In the moment, I responded with a question: “Honey, what exactly makes a person ‘illegitimate’?”

The experience will stick with me forever. It wasn’t just the flagrantly offensive nature of the question that got under my skin. It was the confidence with which she asked it. How certain she was that the “illegitimacy rate” was a concept that could be used to rebut the need to examine and dismantle anti-Black racism.

I have long known of the stereotypes that pervade American notions of the Black family. There’s the stereotype of the “fast” (read: promiscuous and hypersexual) Black girl who gets knocked up as a teenager. The stereotype of the absentee Black father - the Bailing Baby Daddy. There’s the stereotype of the “broken home,” and the presumption of single motherhood and multiple fathers if there are multiple children. The problem with these stereotypes is the problem with all stereotypes: They create false large-scale ideas about large people groups, and therefore strip living, breathing human beings of their complexity and humanity. Enter Angie Thomas. In 2017, Thomas’s smash hit “The Hate U Give” introduced us to a Black “traditional” family - a unit formed by a heterosexual married couple and their shared biological children - with a caveat: The eldest child in the Carter family, Seven, has a different birth mother than his younger siblings, Sekani and Starr.

We also learn that Seven and Starr are just over a year apart, which would certainly raise a red flag for the illegitimacy police. In order for siblings to be that close in age, one had to be a baby when the other was conceived. And since we also know Starr’s mother, Lisa, was 18 when she gave birth to Starr, and that Lisa and Starr’s father, Maverick Carter, are the same age, it’s not difficult to deduce that good ol’ Maverick impregnated two girls as a teenager.

It’s clear that things worked out: When we meet Maverick in “The Hate U Give,” he’s a successful entrepreneur, happily married to Starr’s mother, and doing everything in his power to lead and provide for his family. Yes, he was once a gang member and drug dealer, but he’s left all that behind. He is not only present, he’s persistent. Precisely the type of Black dad people presume doesn’t exist.

But one of my favorite things about Angie Thomas (whom I know through work events) is that she’s always willing to dig a little deeper, to peel back another layer. This is what makes her latest novel, “Concrete Rose” - her best, in my opinion - a gift. It not only eviscerates the “fast Black girl” stereotype and debunks the myth of the Bailing Black Baby Daddy, it gives us insight into the life of a boy most people wouldn’t even attempt to look at beyond the surface.