“Being black is an honour,” says former Black Panther activist Maverick by name, maverick by nature Carter (Russell Hornsby) to his nine-year-old daughter Starr by name, star by… you get the gist (Amandla Stenberg) as he lectures her on how to keep safe, not so much if, but when, she gets pulled over by the police. “Keep your hands where they can see them,” he instructs, because “moving makes the police get nervous”.

Fast forward several years and the honour of being black “because you come from greatness” is not one shared by the trigger-happy white Cop 115 (Drew Starkey) who guns down Starr’s first crush Khalil (Algee Smith as the “brown-skinned Moses”) for the crime of reaching for a hairbrush. With no witnesses and only grainy dash-cam footage for evidence, said cop is put on paid administrative leave and attempts to press charges hit the buffers when Khalil’s links to the local drug dealer King (Anthony Mackie) provokes threats of violence for “snitching”.

Between a rock and a hard place, Starr returns to a life in limbo in Garden Heights, a close-knit African-American community blighted by drugs and violence which much like the local high school is where you go to get drunk, high, pregnant or killed. Fortunately, her father and mother Lisa (Regina Hall) opted to put her in a private, predominantly white school which is geared towards churning out the next generation of college-bound movers and shakers. Unfortunately, she finds herself the only black in the village where she is forced to tone down her identity and put up with thinly veiled racism from her so-called liberal-minded friend Hailey (Sabrina Carpenter).

With the brutal death of Khalil still fresh in her mind, and with rising anger on the streets leading to “Just Us for Justice” marches which boil over into violence, Starr has a decision to make: confront the titular hate which white people and the rich and powerful in society show towards black people and the poor and oppressed in society; and/or confront the hate within the black community which leads to division rather than unity, weakness rather than strength, and in so doing break the cycle of tit-for-tat violence. Or literally play the white man and keep shtum.

Adapted from Angie Thomas’ young adult novel of the same name, The Hate U Give by the late Audrey Wells takes its name from the “Thug Life” tattoo, lyric and philosophy of the late American hip-hop artist Tupac, the full acronym of which is “The Hate U Give Little Infants F**ks Everyone”. The message is self-evident, but the themes as directed by George Tillman Jr. are far from black and white, with institutional racism as much in the spotlight as casual and internalised racism.

With stories of gun-toting white cops killing unarmed black civilians forever in the news (“The same story, just a different name,” comments a political activist at Khalil’s funeral), it is no wonder that Thomas took inspiration from the death of Oscar Grant who in the early hours of New Years Day 2009 was innocently murdered by a Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer for the crime of being black. The events of which were dramatised in Ryan Coogler’s award-winning movie Fruitvale Station.

Almost 10 years have passed since Oscar’s death, but the questions asked at the time remain the same unanswered today: what, if anything, has changed? And how many more innocent young black men must be murdered by white men in uniform before the government acts? Unfortunately, these are questions which are too “bigly” to answer for the pussy-grabbing President of the United States whose divide-and-conquer strategy fans the flames of hate.

Director: George Tillman Jr.
Writers: Audrey Wells (screenplay by), Angie Thomas (based upon the novel by)
Stars: Amandla Stenberg, Regina Hall, Russell Hornsby
Peter Callaghan
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