No matter how she speaks or what school she attends, Starr will never be safe from the assumptions her peers will make about her, her neighborhood, or her friends. Hailey’s insistence that “a brush looks like a gun in his hand” pushes Starr to her breaking point because her friend’s racism is no longer masked or diminishable. This tension comes to a head when news reports confirm that Khalil was unarmed at the time of his death, and had been holding a hairbrush, not a gun, when he was shot. For Hailey, it’s a sign that Starr is becoming one of “those Black girls” who “makes everything about race,” a transgression against the supposed racial neutrality of their majority white school. For Starr, posting the photo is an acknowledgment of the baggage that comes with being Black in a space populated by white people. Later, Starr confronts Hailey about unfollowing her Tumblr account after she posts a photoset featuring the brutalized body of Emmett Till. And when the Williamson students stage a “protest” in support of Black Lives Matter but use it as an excuse to skip class and party, Starr is forced to acknowledge the ways in which her identity is diametrically at odds with her friends. When Hailey suggests that Starr should pretend a basketball is “a piece of fried chicken” so that she can catch it better, Starr is furious, but second guesses her rage. Over the course of the movie, Starr’s relationship with her white friend Hailey (Sabrina Carpenter) deteriorates because Hailey makes flippant racial comments and insists that Starr’s new interest in racial-justice work is offensive. In the wake of Khalil’s death, Starr no longer thinks about Blackness as an abstract concept that she’s exempted from because of the school she attends and the friends she’s made. Slick comments from her white friends are harder to get over. Suddenly, microaggressions are more difficult to ignore. Being the sole witness to Khalil’s shooting also pushes the feelings she’s been suppressing to the surface. As a result, Starr is left to deal with a deeply traumatic event without a reliable school support system. Though her boyfriend Chris (KJ Apa) and best friends Hailey (Sabrina Carpenter) and Maya (Megan Lawless) know that something has changed, she finds it difficult to confide in them because she believes they’ll perceive her differently if they know where she’s from and what she’s witnessed. In the aftermath of the shooting, Starr struggles to hide the trauma and fear she’s feeling from her social circle at Williamson. In other words, Black boys are socially rewarded for confirming or reinforcing problematic stereotypes about Blackness while Black girls are harshly punished.
For Black girls, however, fitting in is much more difficult because they’re positioned as loud, aggressive, and unapproachable, leading to increased, disparate disciplinary actions, including a suspension rate that’s six times that of their white female peers. A 2013 study published in the Sociology of Education found that Black boys who attend white suburban schools have an easier time fitting in due to “positive” associations with their athletic skill and presupposed “coolness.” While those assumptions are reductive and limiting, they provide an avenue for integration.
The social consequences Starr fears are real, and for her, assimilation is a survival tactic. When she goes to Williamson, the markers of her Blackness are stripped away and she begins code-switching because “Williamson Starr doesn’t give anyone a reason to call her ghetto.” Being stereotyped as the “angry Black girl” isn’t a petty or trivial concern. Until Khalil’s death, Starr’s life has been marked by a strict dichotomy between the low-income and predominantly Black Garden Heights neighborhood that she calls home, and Williamson, the upper-middle class, predominantly white prep school that she and her brothers attend. The Hate U Give, based on Angie Thomas’s bestselling young-adult novel, examines Starr’s relationship to Blackness after she witnesses the police-involved death of her childhood friend Khalil (Algee Smith). Du Bois describes “double consciousness” as the difficulty of “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of a racist white society and measuring oneself by the means of a nation that looked back in contempt.” It’s the principle that guides The Hate U Give’s Starr Carter (Amandla Stenberg) until a tragedy merges her two worlds. Video of The Hate U Give | Official Trailer | 20th Century FOX