I know I enjoy watching purposefully awful movies just as much as the next person. I’ve watched my fair share of made for TV and Hallmark Christmas movies, and spent entirely too much money on Friday nights seeing gory slasher flicks, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
However, last Friday night, I went to see The Hate U Give, which tells the story of a young African American teenager named Starr (Amandla Stenberg), who lives in a black neighborhood and attends a primarily white school. Her narrative represents the greater struggle of police brutality against African Americans today, and the infinite issues that percolate out from it. While this is by far not my first time seeing a movie which breeches on current topics of social justice, it reinforced just how important movies can be in spreading the issues at work in our society and encouraging discourse between all parties.
The Hate U Give explores a vastly complex issue, and of course all aspects of it cannot be discussed here. In essence, the movie portrays a young woman who witnesses the unjust murder of her friend, Khalil (Algee Smith), by a white police officer that mistakes his hairbrush for a gun after being pulling him over for a minor traffic violation. As the story progresses, we find that he, like many before him, has been the victim of a vicious cycle, where children of minority communities fall into a trap of criminal means to an income and substantiate white fear of blacks. Meanwhile, we see our eye witness deal not just with grief, but with a constant internal and external battle between her fear of standing up and becoming a target within her communities at home and at school, and her need to do so for her childhood friend and the countless victims of police brutality.
The issues she faces at home emphasize important contextual variables that surround the issues at play in Black Lives Matter and ending police brutality. One of the main issues is that violence assaults black communities from all fronts. They receive it from the police, whose narrow understanding causes them to polarize their views on all black people, and they receive it internally from gang members and criminals that have developed a choke hold on their communities. In the movie we see this portrayed through a gang lord’s violent threats for Starr to stay silent about Khalil dealing drugs.
We also see how she struggles to remain untargeted at her primarily white high school following the shooting. She finds that she can no longer suppress her blackness, as she watches her friends and boyfriend white-wash not only her, but also Khalil’s death. In this portion of the plot two of the white characters come to represent problematic aspects of the white perspective on police brutality. Her boyfriend, Chris (K.J. Apa), struggles to comprehend her black heritage and the issues she faces, claiming like many other well-meaning but ignorant white people that he “doesn’t see color.” Her best friend, Hailey (Sabrina Carpenter), represents the racist views many white people have on the Black Lives Matter discourse by sympathizing with the police and seeing social justice as a temporary fad instead of a life or death issue.
What I think may be one of the most important takeaways, for me (a middle-class white woman), is that I find my former self in the problematic white characters portrayed in the film. I am not proud to say that when I was in high school, I too shared views on police brutality that emphasized white privilege and an ignorant disregard for the issues that plague the black community. This is why films like The Hate U Give are so important in spreading messages of social issues, because it encourages people like me to analyze how their unintentional micro-aggressions have contributed to the permeation of these struggles and think about how to be a better ally. I also find it important that not every white character in the film is redeemable. While Chris learns more about the issues at play and how he too has been problematic, we see that Starr cuts Hailey out of her life because she has remained ignorant and in fear of acknowledging her prejudices.
As a whole, it is so important for all members of the community to see films like The Hate U Give, for black people to see their story represented and for white people to better understand the complexity of the issues. So next Friday, when you and your friends are debating which movie to watch, choose a movie that portrays important issues like police brutality, because stimulation of conversation among friends is a contributing step towards social change.