The Hate U Give: Police Brutality in and Outside of Fiction

I'll never give up.
I'll never be quiet.
I promise.

When Angie Thomas, a freshly graduated college student who wrote the earliest form of the story as part of Creative Writing coursework, published her young adult book The Hate U Give in 2015, her novel reminded me of the death of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

(Brown was an eighteen-year-old. Apparently he had a tug-of-war with a police officer on opposite sides of the police car window. Then Brown, shot in the hand during the altercation, ran down the street, away from the car. He was shot at least six times and died on the spot — according to a Wikipedia article, forensic evidence suggested that he was charging back toward the police officer. A grand jury and the US Department of Justice investigated; both declined to prosecute the officer in the end. While he and others are mentioned in the book, The Hate U Give is most directly inspired, however, by events in 2009 when police killed another American: Oscar Grant.)

George Floyd (October 14, 1973 – May 25, 2020)
Student athlete, security guard, father.
via Wikimedia Commons
Further reading in Wikipedia here

Angie Thomas's story is told from the perspective of a teenager, Starr, whose friend Khalil is shot dead by a police officer. The police officer stops the car the two young people were driving in. Then he mistakes a hairbrush that Khalil wanted to pick up for a gun, and — hyper sensitized by racial stereotyping to presume crime where there is none — overreacts and fires his gun.

     They leave Khalil's body in the street like it's an exhibit. Police cars and ambulances flash all along Carnation Street. People stand off to the side, trying to see what happened.
[...]
   The paramedics can't do shit for Khalil, so they put me in the back of an ambulance like I need help. The bright lights spotlight me, and people crane their necks to get a peek.
    I don't feel special. I feel sick.

Then, when Khalil's death is no longer ignored, because of social media gossip, his story has become the property of the public and the press. His reputation is maligned. It also becomes clear that no prosecution of the police officer will happen, if it is left to the shooter's own department. But after a while the state attorney steps in to begin a prosecution, and 16-year-old Starr faces the burden of being the principal witness.

And the protests (and riots, partly undertaken by white people who aren't residents of the neighbourhood) are already underway. Alongside them, too, there are the first attempts to repair both an already figuratively broken system and a newly, literally broken neighbourhood.

***



It feels a bit impossible, as a European observing the US across borders, to know how to react to the death of George Floyd, the Minnesotan man who has died after a policeman kneeled on his throat. But I think that Angie Thomas's book might be worth reading at this time. It reduces political questions and surmises about what police brutality, racism, and riots, look like, to portraits of real people, places, and experiences. It treats the human experience as it is felt in person, not across the internet.

Besides I have been following commentary from Angie Thomas on Twitter.
Also, amongst many others:
Ava DuVernay, director of films e.g. Selma and the Central Park Five drama When They See Us
Sherrilyn Ifill, President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund
Soledad O'Brien, producer, former news anchor for CNN
Eric Reid, football player

In more concrete terms, American friends have suggested e.g. donating to funds that are helping to bail out protesters who have been arrested.

There is a still-relevant Amnesty International document here with recommendations for police departments and the justice system to help reduce brutality and injustice, including racist brutality and injustice: "USA: Race, Rights and Police Brutality" (1998)

And, of course, as the Prime Minister of Canada recently noted, racism and police brutality don't end at the American border. We can work against them in our own countries.