The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“Can’t be silent”

Another GR reader called this book “a literary Rorschach test” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). I don’t think there is a better description. It elicits whatever is in your head into the clear air. The novel presents image after image of racial reality in the United States and asks the reader to suggest what they mean. It isn’t political; it’s phenomenological: ‘Here’s how things are. What do you think?’

The ‘things’ in question range from white privilege, to gangs, to gun violence (particularly by police), to drugs, to today’s forms of segregation, and the ways in which families adapt to these things - or don’t. Thomas’s writing is sharp, witty, humorous, and tight. Her movement in and out of dialect, and in and out of the two cultures inhabited by a talented 16 year old black girl in a white school is remarkably skilled.

My reaction to the Rorschach test is not to the images themselves but to what I think is behind them: purpose. What Thomas shows is that human beings are insistently purposeful creatures. And when these purposes are expressed inarticulately or are unrecognized by other human beings, they look suspicious, criminal, and ultimately evil.

For example, regarding gang membership: “With King Lords [a gang], we had a whole bunch of folks who had our backs, no matter what. They bought us clothes and shit our momma couldn’t afford and always made sure we ate.’ He looks at the counter. It was just cool to have somebody take care of us for a change, instead of the other way around.” Not much different from the Mormons then.

And Thomas knows that when human purposes interact, there’s a rhetorical battle going on to establish legitimacy. Some purposes get rationalized and presented as obviously superior to other purposes. This is the source not just of evil but of the ultimate evil - hatred.

In a crucial scene, for example, Thomas has the father of the policeman who is accused of murdering a teenager give a speech to the media: “‘My son loved working in the neighborhood,’ One-Fifteen’s [the cop’s badge number] father claims. ‘He always wanted to make a difference in the lives there.’ Funny. Slave masters thought they were making a difference in black people’s lives too. Saving them from their ‘wild African ways.’ Same shit, different century. I wish people like them would stop thinking that people like me need saving.”

So this thing we call purpose is more than a bit tricky. If we don’t make it clear why we do things, it looks like we’re stupid, hapless, and up to no good. We “can’t be silent” without betraying ourselves, as one of the characters says. On the other hand, if we presume that we do things for some crisply-stated morally ‘higher good’ we are probably deluding ourselves and everyone else about motives hidden even to ourselves. So neither can we be silent when we are exposed to such moralistic cant, even from our own mouths.

Of course I could be entirely wrong about this. Thomas of course is the one with all the dodgy pictures.

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