The Hate U Give summary

Fast-forward six years. Starr is at a Garden Heights party with her friend, Kenya. It’s her first party and she’s like a fish out of water. It’s because she spends so much time with those bougie white kids, Kenya teases. When Kenya leaves her alone, Starr tries to play it cool and tries to hide how awkward she’s feeling by acting like she’s busy on her phone.

In Garden Heights, she’s invisible. It’s hard to know folks when you’re a latchkey kid who goes to school across town and they only see packing groceries at the store. Williamson’s different. Being Black at an almost all-white school makes her cool by default. Funny how it works with white kids, she thinks: being Black is dope until it’s hard. But fitting in at school isn’t easy either. Williamson Starr flips a switch in her brain. She doesn’t use slang. If a rapper would say it, she doesn’t, even if her white friends do. She doesn’t give anyone side-eyes. She holds her tongue. Basically, she makes sure no one ever has a reason to call her “ghetto.”

Thomas began working on her novel in 2012 after a police shooting in California. Like Khalil, the victim was Black and unarmed; the officer, white. Thomas was interested in the stories told in the wake of such incidents. Whose voices do they foreground? Which details do they include – or omit? Who gets the benefit of context – and who’s harmed by it?

These are stories told by the media and they have powerful framing effects. In the Hate U Give, the media, which is a character in its own right, has a powerful voice – and it consistently challenges Starr’s. After the shooting, reporters give Khalil a new name: Khalil Harris, Suspected Drug Dealer. His death is secondary; what reporters want to talk about are his connections to criminality. Family and friends aren’t silenced – they’re denied a hearing. Officer One-Fifteen’s father, meanwhile, is invited onto TV shows to talk about his son’s ordeal. He uses his platform to claim that Khalil threatened his son and made him fear for his life.

Tupac called his group Thug Life. Lots of folks thought he was endorsing the violent, do-or-die gangsta outlaw’s lifestyle. Khalil knew better. He talked about it the night he was killed. Starr teased him. Typical Khalil, listening to some old-timer, not Kanye. But he was serious. Thug Life was an acronym, he said; it stood for “The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everbody.”

The next time Starr heard Tupac was weeks later. She was sitting in Daddy’s car. Acrid smoke hung over Garden Heights – evidence of the protests after Khalil’s funeral a few days earlier and the riots that followed. Officer One-Fifteen hadn’t been charged and people were pissed – so pissed that they burned down half the neighborhood.

How do you break the cycle of hate?

By the end of the novel, Starr has an answer: you bear witness and testify.