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NY Times, Mar. 20 2017
New Crop of Young Adult Novels Explores Race and Police Brutality
By ALEXANDRA ALTER
Angie Thomas started writing her young-adult novel, “The Hate U Give,”
in reaction to a fatal shooting that took place some 2,000 miles away.
But to her it felt deeply personal.
Ms. Thomas was a college student in Jackson, Miss., when a white transit
police officer shot Oscar Grant III, an unarmed, 22-year-old
African-American man, on a train platform in Oakland, Calif., in 2009.
She was shocked when some of her white classmates said he had probably
deserved it. She responded with a short story about a teenage girl who
is drawn to activism after a white officer shoots her childhood best friend.
That story grew into a 444-page novel, as shootings of unarmed young
black men continued.
Ms. Thomas worried that no one would publish a young-adult novel about
such a raw and polarizing subject. Instead, 13 publishers bid in a
frenzied auction. Balzer & Bray bought it in a two-book deal, and Fox
2000 optioned the film rights.
When “The Hate U Give” came out last month, it became an instant
critical and commercial hit, with more than 100,000 copies in print. The
novel — one of several new children’s books that use fiction to address
police shootings of unarmed black teenagers — debuted at the top of The
New York Times’s Young Adult best-seller list, and has drawn ecstatic
praise from critics, librarians, book sellers and prominent young-adult
novelists. John Green, the author of “The Fault in Our Stars,” called
the work “a stunning, brilliant, gut-wrenching novel that will be
remembered as a classic of our time.”
“The Hate U Give,” which takes its title from a phrase coined by the
rapper Tupac Shakur, is one of a cluster of young-adult novels that
confront police brutality, racial profiling and the Black Lives Matter
movement. Several are debut novels from young African-American writers
who have turned to fiction as a form of activism, hoping that their
stories can help frame and illuminate the persistence of racial
injustice for young readers.
“For me, specifically for black teenagers, it’s a reflection of what
we’re all facing right now,” said Jay Coles, a 21-year-old college
student from Indianapolis, who sold his first novel, “Tyler Johnson Was
Here,” to Little, Brown Books for Young Readers this year. Mr. Coles
said he had started writing the book, which centers on a black teenager
whose twin brother is shot by a police officer, as a way to process his
depression and rage after Trayvon Martin was killed in Florida in 2012.
This fall, Crown Books for Young Readers will publish Nic Stone’s debut
novel, “Dear Martin,” about a black high school scholarship student at
an Atlanta prep school who becomes a victim of racial profiling when an
off-duty officer fires at him and his best friend during an argument at
a traffic light.
In “Ghost Boys,” a middle-grade novel by Jewell Parker Rhodes, the ghost
of a young black boy who was shot by a white police officer witnesses
the aftermath of his death, and meets the ghosts of other black boys,
including Emmett Till, the black teenager who was killed by white men in
1955. The novel, which Little, Brown Books for Young Readers will
release next spring, was partly inspired by the death of 12-year-old
Tamir Rice.
Teachers and librarians across the country have embraced the new body of
children’s literature dealing with racial bias and injustice. Hundreds
of schools and libraries have ordered copies of “The Hate U Give.” Other
recent young-adult novels about violence against black teenagers,
including Kekla Magoon’s “How It Went Down,” have been used in high
school classrooms to talk about racial inequality.
Some educators see fiction as a particularly potent tool for engaging
with volatile topics and instilling empathy in young readers.
“Kids have so many questions, and they want to engage on these topics,”
said Deborah Taylor, a youth librarian in Baltimore. “We kind of shy
away from the notion that this is a fact of life for our kids.”
The cluster of novels is also arriving at a moment when the children’s
book industry is struggling to address the lack of diversity in the
stories it publishes, and the scarcity of children’s books by
African-American authors.
While the number of children’s books featuring African-American
characters has grown in the last decade, the number of books by black
authors has barely budged, according to data collected by the
Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Education. Out of some 3,400 children’s
books published in 2016, 278 featured black characters, up from 153 in
2006. But only 92 of those books were written by black authors, roughly
the same number as a decade ago.
The epidemic of police violence against unarmed African-Americans has
been well covered through nonfiction, in books like Ta-Nehisi Coates’s
“Between the World and Me,” which won the National Book Award, and
Wesley Lowery’s “They Can’t Kill Us All.” But children’s book authors
have only recently begun to tackle the subject in greater numbers.
“This isn’t a literary trend. This is an issue of our time,” said the
novelist Jason Reynolds, who teamed up with Brendan Kiely to write “All
American Boys,” a 2015 novel about an African-American teenager who is
assaulted by an officer who mistakes him for a shoplifter at a bodega.
Over the last two years, Mr. Reynolds and Mr. Kiely have visited more
than 100 schools around the country, speaking to some 40,000 students
about the book. Mr. Reynolds said they occasionally encountered
resistance from nervous school administrators. Scheduled talks at a
school in Newark and a young-adult literary festival in Texas were
canceled over concerns about the politically charged topic, Mr. Reynolds
said.
The overwhelmingly positive reception to “The Hate U Give” has stunned
Ms. Thomas, 29, a former teenage rapper who worked as a church
receptionist in Jackson while finishing her novel. “I knew that while
the topic was timely, it was also controversial,” she said.
“I say, ‘It probably will make you uncomfortable,’” she said. “I’m not
here to give you comfort.’”
As a bookworm growing up in a poor neighborhood in Jackson, Ms. Thomas
didn’t have many literary role models. She tore through the Harry Potter
books and other series at the library after school, but characters whose
lives felt familiar to her were scarce.
“For me, hip-hop was a mirror when young-adult books were not,” she
said. “I could see myself in a Nas song more than I could see myself in
a book.”
In her first year at Belhaven University, she took a creative writing
class, and felt out of place as the only black student in the classroom.
One day, her professor asked students to talk about their travels over
the summer. Ms. Thomas, who was raised by her single mother and
grandmother, had never left Mississippi. When she got to her car in the
parking lot, she cried.
But her professor encouraged her to draw on her own experience in her
writing. “He told me that my stories, and the stories of people in my
community, mattered,” she said. When she turned in the story about
Starr, the narrator of “The Hate U Give,” he told her that she could
turn it into a novel.
“The Hate U Give” takes place in a neighborhood modeled on the community
Ms. Thomas grew up in, where drugs and gang violence were inescapable
but people looked out for one another. Starr shares many of the author’s
traits — she loves basketball and Tupac, and shuttles between two
worlds: her affluent, mostly white private school and her impoverished
neighborhood.
One night after a party, Starr watches as her friend, Khalil, is pulled
over, shot and killed by a white police officer. She struggles with the
risks of coming forward as a witness, as protests erupt in her neighborhood.
“I wanted to make this as personal as possible, so that people can
understand why so many of us are so hurt and so angry,” Ms. Thomas said.
Since the book’s release on Feb. 28, Ms. Thomas has been touring the
country, and has had emotional discussions with young readers. At an
event in Jackson, a group of girls in middle school told her that they
had never met an author who looked like them.
On a recent afternoon in Philadelphia, Ms. Thomas met with 41 teenagers
from local schools who had gathered in a basement at a library. She wore
a camouflage jacket covered with buttons bearing slogans like “Resist,”
and put on a flower crown that one of the students had given her.
The students laughed when she described how she had to send her book
editors links to the Urban Dictionary definition of “lit,” a slang term,
and cheered when she told them that the novel was being adapted into a
movie.
One student asked who inspired her to keep writing when she faced so
many obstacles. A young man asked her about a central character modeled
on Tupac. Others asked her about the challenges of writing about such a
contentious topic.
“I want you to realize your voice matters,” she told the students.
“Writing is a form of activism.”
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