I was about 10 years old when my mom had “the talk” with me about the police. We were in her car when she suddenly turned to me and said, “If the police ever stop and ask you questions, you say you don’t know anything and didn’t see anything.” Just like that, with no pretext. It wasn’t until some years had passed that I started to reflect on what she'd said and realized that in the eyes of the police, my skin color not only makes me automatically suspicious but a potential criminal, and any mere confrontation could become volatile — even fatal — due to the systemic issue of racist police brutality. My mom was trying to protect me. But what happens when silence is no longer the answer? It’s a reckoning that Amandla Stenberg’s character faces in The Hate U Give: whether she should heed her father’s cautious words or rail against a system that perpetuates unlawful violence at the hands of the police.
Based on Angie Thomas’s stirring YA novel of the same name, the film has a scene at the beginning where Maverick (Russell Hornsby) sits his three young children down at the kitchen table to talk to them about what to do if cops ever confront them: “Keep your hands visible. Don't make any sudden moves. Only speak when they speak to you." Years later, these carefully chosen words help protect Maverick’s oldest, Starr (Stenberg), now a teenager, after her friend Khalil (Algee Smith) gets pulled over by a cop for unexplained reasons, with Starr in the passenger seat. She sits quietly yet fearfully, with her hands in plain sight on the dashboard as the cop demands that Khalil step out of the car. Moments later, the officer shoots and kills Khalil. The cop claims he thought Khalil had reached back in his vehicle to draw a gun when he was just grabbing his hairbrush.
The scene serves as a painful reminder of police brutality and the criminalization of black youth— something that Maverick had prepared Starr and her brothers for when they were children, because she could have just as easily been in Khalil’s position. But as important as her dad’s advice is, there’s an even louder voice that thunders in Starr’s mind as she navigates the aftermath of her friend’s murder. While Starr’s predominantly white classmates celebrate an early dismissal from school as part of a Black Lives Matter protest in the wake of Khalil’s death, she is more concerned with her late friend’s face being plastered all over the news and him being described as a “drug dealer” because he was involved in the neighborhood gang.
The micro-aggressions Starr used to shake off — like when her teammate Hailey (Sabrina Carpenter) jokingly advised her to treat a basketball more aggressively, “like it was a bucket of fried chicken” — are more pronounced as she reckons with the reality that Khalil’s death proves yet again that black lives really don’t matter. Starr even begins to see her boyfriend, Chris (K.J. Apa), as another white figure of oppression, despite him showing nothing but support for her during this trying time. That is because as Starr finds her voice in the movement, she feels othered by the white faces around her — even Chris’s. She tells him at one point that he doesn’t see her because he “doesn’t see color,” which effectively erases her unique and often challenging experiences as a black girl in present-day America.
