Now in its third week at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list for young adult books, Angie Thomas’s debut novel, The Hate U Give, seems primed to hold its slot. The book tells the story of Starr Carter, a 16-year-old girl from a poor, predominantly black neighborhood who plays basketball and has a love for Jordans. She attends a mostly white private school and lives between the two worlds — until the day when her childhood best friend is shot by a police officer after being stopped on the road while she’s in the car.
Teen Vogue: Has this story been inside you for a while, or did you have a sudden inspiration?
Angie Thomas: It’s been in me for a while. I first got the idea when I was a senior in college in 2010. It was after Oscar Grant lost his life in Oakland, California — he was killed by a transit cop. At the time I was living in my mostly black, poor neighborhood in Jackson, Mississippi while attending a mostly white upper-middle class college. There was a 10-minute drive between my house and my school but in 10 minutes I drove out of one world and into another. I went from seeing Church’s Chicken on every corner to seeing Starbucks on every corner. And I heard two conversations about Oscar Grant. At home, he was one of our own — I saw kids like him every day who were trying to get their lives right but who had mistakes in their past. And at school, I heard people talk about how maybe Oscar deserved it or wondering why people were so upset about an ex-con. Oscar was dehumanized because he had a record. I was angry and hurt and frustrated. It felt like people at school were saying that someone from my neighborhood deserved to die.
TV: And that’s when you started writing Starr’s story?
AT: Yeah. Instead of flipping every garbage can on campus, I started to write. I wrote a short story that eventually became The Hate U Give as part of my senior project. It was cathartic, but also emotionally taxing, so although I had a professor who encouraged me to turn the story into a novel, I put it aside. There was another factor too: We didn’t have We Need Diverse Books back then. I was afraid this book would be too black for publishers. So I tried to write books about characters who weren’t as diverse, stories that I thought would get me into the publishing world more quickly.
TV: So what made you return to Starr?
AT: Trayvon Martin. Michael Brown. Tamir Rice. Ramarley Graham. I was angry, I was hurt. I was hearing politicians say maybe Trayvon deserved it, hearing people talk about how Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy, got what he should have got. I see guys like that every day. I had to write the book, not to be published but to get the story down. It took me six months to draft it — the words just poured out of me.
TV: And once you had a draft, the publishing world responded. Why, do you think?
AT: We’re seeing more books that deal with these topics now, like Kekla Magoon’s How it Went Down and All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. The reason, to be honest, is because of cameras and social media. This type of incident — police brutality — has been going on for decades in the black community, but nobody was recording it. Rodney King was a news story in the '90s because his beating was on tape, and it still wasn’t enough [to get a conviction for the police officers involved]. The black community asks you to believe us, then gives you proof with these videos, and still we don’t have justice. For so long, black America has been crying out, “our lives matter too,” and nobody was listening. I’m glad that people are taking notice in some way now, that publishing is starting to reflect these stories. Kids need mirrors and windows into their own worlds.
TV: The Hate U Give is a hugely complex novel. Was it a challenge to weave so much into one story?
AT: It felt overwhelming. I tell people this and they look at me surprised, but one of biggest influences to writing the book was Harry Potter and the way J.K. Rowling created that world. It is complex and gray in a lot of ways; there are so many characters and the text is huge. But every character feels real and feels whole, which is what I wanted to do with this book.
Also, Black Lives Matter. Those three words are such a complex topic. You speak those words to some and they say “All Lives Matter,” so I wanted to address that angle. You say “Black Lives Matter” to another person and they’ll say, “Black lives need to matter to black lives,” talking about black on black crime — so I wanted to address that too. To someone else, you say “Black Lives Matter” and they think of police violence and poverty. Those three words meant I had no choice but to write a complex story — I wanted to address any and all questions or criticisms that might come at me. That way, when people finish the book, they’ll get why we say those three words and they’ll stop trying to distract from it.
TV: In the book, Starr lives in two worlds like the ones you experienced — her home neighborhood and her private school. Why was it important to you to show both?
AT: Code switching is something so many African-Americans understand — it’s a survival tactic. In college, I was two Angies. I’d leave my house listening to TuPac and put on Jonas Brothers when I got to campus. I realized later how much I had done, consciously and unconsciously, to assimilate. You can’t go into white spaces being too black, and Starr knows that.
It would have been easy to have Starr stay in her neighborhood and react to the incident in the book only with her neighbors, but I wanted to show other communities reacting. I wanted to show her with a white boyfriend, and white friends using this boy’s death as a way to get out of class [with a disingenuous “protest”]. I felt like I would reach more readers if I did that. And I’ve had readers, black girls, come up to me and say, “I can’t identify with Starr in her hood because I haven’t lived like that, but in her school, that’s me.” They see Starr being the only black girl at her school and hearing her peers make comments justifying unarmed black people losing their lives — I couldn’t write about that side of things if I kept the setting in Starr’s neighborhood. I had to go beyond that and give a wider view to hopefully allow more readers to connect.
TV: The book is being read so broadly. What have you heard from readers?
AT: So many black girls have reached out to me even before they’ve read the book to thank me for the cover. They actually see themselves on the cover of a New York Times Bestseller. For that girl who sees that people are buying a book about somebody like her, that gives her more value and helps her feel like she matters. I even told my publisher, “As a teen, you guys failed me because you didn’t give me books. I had to look to hip-hop to show me myself.” One young black boy came up to me and said, “Yo, I don’t like reading but I read this in a day. That sh* is hot.” I hope publishing starts to pay attention to those kids who they think are reluctant readers — they’ll read if you give them something where they can see themselves. Maybe you shouldn’t write them off, so they don’t write themselves off.
Which reminds me, teen girls don’t get enough credit for being the badasses that they are.