News of death and destruction has so many of us feeling blue, but one young Black woman turned a popular movement into art in super awesome ways.
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In recent years, Black Lives Matter has spearheaded a movement for the importance of the lives of Black people in the face of police brutality. For writer Angie Thomas, however, the movement was both a source of pain and inspiration for her debut novel, “The Hate U Give”. After witnessing the death of Oscar Grant III and the protests that ensued, Thomas decided to use the movement’s core belief, that Black people and their lives matter, as the basis for her novel:
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“I was seeing so many young people, particularly, have those same feelings because every time we would see these cases the victims were young. Trayvon Martin was 17. Tamir Rice was 12. So when I set out to write it, I wanted to not only write it for myself to get my feelings out, but to write it for the kids that I saw in my neighborhood every single day affected by these cases. I didn’t set out to make it the Black Lives Matter novel. But I wrote in hopes of having people understand why we say, Black Lives Matter.”
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Beyond wanting to give voice to the pain many feel within the BLM movement, Thomas also discussed how her upbringing as a Black girl in a mostly-white private school inspired the story of Starr, the novel’s main character. She told interviewers that she, like Starr, had to “code-switch”, or switch between the way she spoke at home and the way she spoke at school, so folks wouldn’t stereotype her. She wanted to show the “fractured” nature of her upbringing, and illuminated a beauty many wouldn’t think about in the process:
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“I want to give our readers a little hope. I want to find the light in the darkness. I want to highlight that and let them know that their voices matter and that their lives matter. Because so often the message from the mainstream is that they don’t.”
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Thomas’s reasons for writing “The Hate U Give” are so noteworthy and inspiring. Like so many great artists before her, Thomas turned pain and activism into art, and we at New Sincerity are all about that.
