Cookie Consent by FreePrivacyPolicy.com
JAAAS Logo

Articles

Vol. 2 No. 1 (2020): Early Career Americanists: An AYA Special Issue

'The World Called Him a Thug': Police Brutality and the Perception of the Black Body in Angie Thomas's The Hate U Give

Submitted
March 5, 2019
Published
2020-12-29

Abstract

Widespread police violence, often targeted at black people, has increasingly entered public debates in recent years. Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, various African American young adult novelists have addressed the topic of police brutality and offer counternarratives to the stories about black victims disseminated in the media. This article illustrates how prevalent debates of Black Lives Matter are reflected in contemporary young adult fiction. To this end, the first part elucidates substantial issues that have led to the precarious position of African Americans today and to the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. Drawing on theoretical concepts such as Judith Butler’s notion of "precarious lives" and Frantz Fanon’s description of the black experience in a white-dominated world, I will analyze Angie Thomas's novel The Hate U Give in view of ongoing debates about racial inequality. As I will show, the novel features striking similarities to real-world incidents of police brutality while simultaneously drawing attention to the manifold ways in which society disregards black lives and continues to subject African Americans to racial injustice.

References

  1. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.
  2. Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press, 2011.
  3. Almukhtar, Sarah, Mercy Benzaquen, Damien Cave, Sahil Chinoy, Kenan Davis, Josh Keller, K.K. Rebecca Lai, Jasmine C. Lee, Rochelle Oliver, Haeyoun Park, and Destinée-Charisse Royal. "Black Lives Upended by Policing: The Raw Videos Sparking Outrage." New York Times. April 19, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/19/us/police-videos-race.html.
  4. Bacon, Perry, Jr. "Trump and Other Conservatives Embrace 'Blue Lives Matter' Movement." NBC News. July 23, 2016. https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/2016-conventions/trump-other-conservatives-embrace-blue-lives-matter-movement-n615156.
  5. Bergner, Daniel. "Is Stop-and-Frisk Worth It?" The Atlantic. April, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/04/is-stop-and-frisk-worth-it/358644/.
  6. Bishop, Rudine Sims. "Reflections on the Development of African American Children's Literature." Journal of Children's Literature 38, no. 2 (2012): 5-13.
  7. Block, Melissa. "The Racially Charged Meaning Behind the Word 'Thug.'" April 30, 2015. In All Things Considered, produced by NPR, podcast. https://www.npr.org/2015/04/30/403362626/the-racially-charged-meaning-behind-the-word-thug.
  8. Butler, Judith. "Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street." Transversal. September 2011. https://transversal.at/transversal/1011/butler/en.
  9. Butler, Judith. "Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia." In Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, edited by Robert Gooding-Williams, 15-22. New York: Routledge, 1993.
  10. Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997.
  11. Butler, Judith. The Force of Non-Violence: An Ethico-Political Bind. Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2020.
  12. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2006.
  13. Butler, Judith. "What's Wrong With 'All Lives Matter'?" Interview by George Yancy. The New York Times. January 12, 2015. https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/12/whats-wrong-with-all-lives-matter/.
  14. Carroll, Rory. "Rodney King: 'I Had to Learn to Forgive.'" The Guardian. May 1, 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/may/01/rodney-king-learn-to-forgive.
  15. The Counted. "People Killed by Police in the US." The Guardian. June 4, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database.
  16. Del Real, Jose A., Robert Samuels, and Tim Craig. "How the Black Lives Matter Movement Went Mainstream." Washington Post. June 9, 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/how-the-black-lives-matter-movement-went-mainstream/2020/06/09/201bd6e6-a9c6-11ea-9063-e69bd6520940_story.html.
  17. Edwards, Frank, Hedwig Lee, and Michael Esposito. "Risk of Being Killed by Police Use of Force in the United States by Age, Race–Ethnicity, and Sex." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 116, no.34 (2019): 16793-16798. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1821204116.
  18. "Fact Sheet: Trends in U.S. Corrections." The Sentencing Project. August 2020. https://www.sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Trends-in-US-Corrections.pdf.
  19. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008.
  20. Federal Bureau of Investigation. "Expanded Homicide Data." Crime in the United States. 2015. Fall 2016. 1–4.
  21. Galinsky, Adam, Kurt Hugenberg, Carla Groom, and Galen V. Bodenhausen. "The Reappropriation of Stigmatizing Labels: Implications for Social Identity." Research on Managing Groups and Teams, no. 5 (2003): 221–56. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1534-0856(02)05009-0.
  22. Garza, Alicia. "A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement by Alicia Garza." The Feminist Wire. October 7, 2014. http://www.thefeministwire.com/2014/10/blacklivesmatter-2/.
  23. "Herstory." Black Lives Matter. November 29, 2018. https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/herstory/.
  24. hooks, bell. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Boston: South End Press, 1989.
  25. Khan-Cullors, Patrisse, and Asha Bandele. When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2017.
  26. Lewis, Tim. "Angie Thomas, Author of The Hate U Give: 'Books Play a Huge Part in Resistance.'" The Guardian. January 27, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/27/angie-thomas-the-hate-u-give-interview-famous-fans-readers.
  27. Lorde, Audre. "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action." In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, edited by Audre Lorde, 40–44. New York: Crossing Press, 2007.
  28. Lorde, Audre. "The Uses of Anger." Women’s Studies Quarterly 9, no. 3 (1981): 7–10.
  29. Oppel, Richard A., Jr., Robert Gebeloff, K.K. Rebecca Lai, Will Wright, and Mitch Smith. "The Fullest Look Yet at the Racial Inequity of Coronavirus." New York Times, July 5, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/05/us/coronavirus-latinos-african-americans-cdc-data.html.
  30. "Police Violence Map." Mapping Police Violence. https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/. Accessed August 18, 2020.
  31. Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. London: Penguin Books, 2015.
  32. Richardson, Allissa V. "The Problem with Police-Shooting Videos." New York Times. August 30, 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/08/the-problem-with-police-shooting-videos-jacob-blake/615880/?fbclid=IwAR06VLHM7_CKRZ1TBn38qtRuTx63nCducQZ3AOUzrg_-g230I2co7zab-3A.
  33. Sawyer, Wendy. “The Gender Divide: Tracking Women’s State Prison Growth.” Prison Policy Initiative. January 9, 2018. https://www.prisonpolicy.org /reports/women_overtime.html.
  34. Seiler, Cotton. "Mobilizing Race, Racializing Mobility: Writing Race into Mobility Studies." In Mobility in History: The State of the Art in the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility, edited by Gijs Mom, Gordon Pirie, and Laurent Tissot, 229–33. Neuchâtel: Presses Universitaires Suisses, 2009.
  35. Smiley, CalvinJohn, and David Fakunle. "From 'Brute' to 'Thug': The Demonization and Criminalization of Unarmed Black Male Victims in America." Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment 26, nos. 3–4 (2016): 350–66. https://doi.org/10.1080/10911359.2015.1129256.
  36. Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016.
  37. Thomas, Angie. The Hate U Give. New York: Balzer + Bray, 2017.
  38. "Trayvon Martin Shooting Fast Facts." CNN. May 7, 2018. https://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/05/us/trayvon-martin-shooting-fast-facts/index.html.
  39. Trump, Donald J. (@realDonaldTrump). "....These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd." Twitter. May 29, 2020. https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1266231100780744704.
  40. United States Census Bureau. "Quick Facts." https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045217. Accessed June 15, 2018.
  41. Wagner, Peter, and Wendy Sawyer. "Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020." Prison Policy Initiative, March 24, 2020. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html.
  42. Ward, Jesmyn. The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race. New York: Scribner, 2016.
  43. Yancy, George and Judith Butler. "What's Wrong With 'All Lives Matter'?" New York Times, January 12, 2015, https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/12/whats-wrong-with-all-lives-matter/.
  44. Yancy, George. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.

Similar Articles

1-10 of 88

You may also start an advanced similarity search for this article.