The Hate U Give is one of my favorite novels and I believe everyone should read it. The book discusses situations, both commonplace and infuriating, that young people, especially black teenagers, are facing today.
“I do not like or agree with this book.”
“Neither do I.”
“Let’s ban it.”
I imagine this is the conversation that accompanies the banning of books. What I don’t understand, though, is that it is the reader’s choice to read the book, an at-your-own-risk Choose Your Own Adventure. No one enjoys every book they read, and people can’t ban everything they don’t like. If so, there would be no dark chocolate, no tomatoes, no racism, and everyone would live in my perfect world, where the flag is pink, college is free, and The Flash isn’t just a show on TV.
These conversations I imagine can’t be new, given the history of barring students from novels in the United States. Beloved was violent, The Autobiography of Malcolm X was viewed as a how-to manual for crime, The Catcher in the Rye was simply “unacceptable,” The Great Gatsby mentioned sex, and Moby-Dick “conflicted with community values.”
The book that has me thinking about book banning in the first place is T.H.U.G. (The Hate U Give). It was banned in Texas, specifically the Katy Independent School District outside of Houston, because of language deemed inappropriate for students. This school district has 70,563 students within grades K-12. Thirty-six percent of the students are white, 35 percent of the students are Hispanic, 15 percent are Asian, and 11 percent are African American. The district board isn’t as diverse. It contains seven members; all are white. The use of curse words in the award-winning book is evident, but in the grand scheme of things, they are not used a lot.
I can understand why people are hating on The Hate U Give. This young-adult novel, which was published in 2017, is about a sixteen-year-old named Starr Carter who witnessed her best friend get murdered by the police after the two were stopped on their way home. After the incident, her two worlds, a private predominantly white high school and her own neighborhood, Garden Heights, begin to collide. Williamson High School is full of affluent and snobby students. Garden Heights, on the other hand, is an impoverished predominantly black community. The only similarity the two settings have is that Starr does not seem to fit in either. In her own community, she is known for bagging groceries at her father’s store and for going to a fancy school outside of Garden Heights. When at school, she is not “white” enough to fit in, and code switches often. As she starts to feel these fault lines, the #BLM (Black Lives Matter) movement becomes real to her for the first time.
From that summary of the book’s plot, it’s impossible not to think that language was perhaps just a scapegoat for the ban, and that the real reason for keeping the book out of schools was because it confronts realities about racism that our country has spent centuries trying to ignore. The book is suffused with the real-world problems and situations that have always been present in America. Banning these books from schools doesn’t make these issues disappear; it just gives students less room to understand them.
Banning books mutes the voices of the characters within. Though fictional, each character in The Hate U Give carries a specific lesson. For example, Khalil, the character killed in the book, is judged based on his community and race. People who knew him through news chyrons called him a thug and automatically assumed that he was in a gang, exposing the negative connotations that come with an individual’s race. If this sounds familiar, it’s because this is exactly what happened with Trayvon Martin.
Many students have no firsthand experience with the problems in The Hate U Give. Given how difficult it can be to find young-adult books featuring a cast of predominantly people of color, the book also offers unaware readers a chance to see what a world with white privilege offstage—or at least one where white privilege is acknowledged—looks like. Some students reading will never deal with what Starr went through, but they would be able to have some type of understanding when finished. That is a worthy thing for a book to do, not something worth punishing with a ban.
When I read the book I could not put it down. It was the first time I read a book with a female, black main character who was not pregnant by the end, or whose only role in the plot was not to become another negative teen statistic. Starr was a character I could relate to. I loved that.
But the book banning will probably not stop here. I expect Dear Martin by Nic Stone will be targeted next; after I read both this and T.H.U.G., the books have become one big story in my mind. It may be because they touch on similar problems. Either way, I’m waiting for Dear Martin to spark in popularity. I dare someone to try and hate on it.