The Hate U Give
The Hate U Give
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Angie Thomas on The Hate U Give
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Two campuses, one killing, no wordsThomas was a senior at Belhaven University in 2009 when Oscar Grant was shot by a transit officer in Oakland. At home in Jackson’s Georgetown neighborhood, people grieved him as family. At Belhaven, a mostly white private Christian school a few miles away, classmates tried to justify the killing. She sat between those two conversations and found she had nothing to say in either direction.
I figured I had two options. I could either burn down my entire campus or I could use those emotions in my art.
By the time the Zimmerman trial began, Thomas had been watching how the media treated Rachel Jeantel, Trayvon Martin’s friend and the prosecution’s key witness. The public conversation kept returning to Jeantel’s appearance and manner of speaking rather than the substance of what she was saying. That deflection landed on Thomas like a verdict of its own.
Nobody was upholding this young black girl as the hero she was, for doing what she was doing. Instead, they said she didn’t present herself the proper way. I remember thinking, ‘I know so many girls just like Rachel.’
That fury became the architecture of Starr Carter: a Black girl who witnesses her friend’s killing and whose credibility the world immediately begins to audit.
Before she sent the manuscript anywhere, she had spent years as a teenager unable to find herself on library shelves. That absence shaped what she understood the book to be for.
I’m looking at the books and it’s always another white girl in distress. I’m like, ‘How many problems do you have? I have stuff that I’m going through. Where are the books for me?’
Even after the manuscript was finished, fear nearly kept it private. She had written the book without softening anything, and she was uncertain whether the industry would receive it as a legitimate YA novel or dismiss it as too political.
I knew that I made this book as unapologetically black as possible, so I was afraid to query it.
Rather than cold-querying agents, she asked one a question during a public Twitter Q&A: whether a novel about the Black Lives Matter movement was even appropriate for YA. He said yes.
How she wrote it
Names, dialect, and footage she had to stop watchingThomas wanted the world of Garden Heights, the novel’s fictional neighborhood, to carry a specific literary lineage. Every major name in the book was sourced from somewhere outside her own invention, and she has traced each one to its origin.
I wanted Garden Heights to be this concrete garden. And I wanted Starr, Khalil, Seven, Kenya, DeVante, for me, they’re roses in that concrete garden. [paraphrased from audio]
Starr’s name came from Tupac Shakur, who once said he would have named a daughter Starr. Maverick, Starr’s father, was pulled from Mildred Taylor’s ‘Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry,’ where the protagonist describes her own mother as ‘a disrupting maverick.’
The book’s YA label obscured how much legal and documentary work went into it. Thomas needed to understand grand jury proceedings, use-of-force statutes, and the mechanics of how police shootings are investigated before she could write Starr’s testimony and the community’s response to Khalil’s killing with any confidence.
I had to do a lot of legal research, even though the book didn’t dive into those aspects a whole lot. But I needed to be informed regardless, so I spoke with attorneys, read court transcripts, and watched lots of news footage on real-life cases similar to the one in the book.
Dialect was a craft position she defended deliberately, and she had an editorial team that never asked her to back down from it. The distinction she drew was precise: the same community, different registers, both legitimate.
Starr’s Uncle Carlos, he would say ‘all right,’ but her dad would say ‘a’ight.’ Both of them were still black... None of my team working on this book made me dilute my characters’ dialect.
She finished the manuscript during the summer of 2016, a week when two killings, Philando Castile’s and Alton Sterling’s, played on loop across every screen. Her editor and agent had told her the book mattered; that week, she stopped believing them.
Those last pages of the book were written the same week that both Philando Castile and Alton Sterling lost their lives... I did not know either of those gentlemen personally, but seeing their deaths play out over and over again on social media, on the news—it was dramatic, it hurt. And all of a sudden this book that I had been told by my editor and my agent was so important, suddenly it didn’t feel important because here we were once again, seeing two men lose their lives, one of them in front of a four-year-old child, and what in the world can my book do to stop that?
She finished it anyway. The doubt did not leave the pages; it sits inside Starr’s question of whether speaking out changes anything, which is the question the novel turns on.
Hip-hop is not just a soundtrack in the book. It is Thomas’s model for how prose should work: unmediated, direct, willing to go somewhere uncomfortable without apology.
I often say that that’s how I want to write: I want to be as unfiltered and as raw as a rapper when I give these books to these kids.
The personal thread
Writing first to survive, then to be heardThe short story that eventually became the novel was written in 2011, before Thomas had any publishing ambitions for it. She has described the act of writing it as something closer to emergency release than literary ambition.
When I first wrote the story, I have to be honest, I was not writing it for anyone but myself. And I think for writers, for artists, period, one of the best things you can do is do your art for yourself first and foremost. And that’s what it was for me. It was cathartic for me. [paraphrased from audio]
When she expanded the story into a full novel, the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, and Michael Brown had continued to accumulate. She was thinking specifically about the young people in her own neighborhood who felt those deaths as their own, boys who said they could have been Trayvon, girls being thrown to the ground at school by police. She wanted to speak with them rather than about them, and she wanted them to know who she had in mind when she chose her protagonist.
We do so much focus on young black men. I applaud the activists who have come forth in mentorship and in organizing and who have shared their voices and stories. But so often black girls are left out of the narrative.
What she wants us to sit with
Empathy over sympathy, a person over a hashtagThe title encodes a lesson Thomas has returned to in nearly every conversation about the book. ‘Thug’ is the word the media applies to Khalil after his death, and the children in Garden Heights feel it land on themselves. The title reframes the word’s trajectory.
That one word, ‘thug,’ because so many people look at the book title — it spells out the word ‘thug.’ That word is so often used to describe young black men. And I want people to look at that word in a different way. That came from Tupac Shakur and his ‘thug life’ tattoo. It stood for, ‘The hate you give little infants f---- everybody.’ He explained that as meaning that what society feeds into you has a way of affecting us all.
When asked directly what she hopes readers carry away, Thomas answers in four words. The distinction she draws between empathy and sympathy is the engine behind her argument for why fiction can do something that news coverage cannot.
That empathy is more powerful than sympathy.
Sympathy observes from a distance. Empathy requires occupying someone else’s position. Three hundred pages inside Starr’s life is, by Thomas’s logic, the mechanism that produces it.
The readers whose responses have moved Thomas most are Black girls who approach her in tears. For them, the book is frequently the first time they have seen themselves on a cover. She has also fielded the counterargument that a very specific story cannot speak to everyone, and she rejects it.
There’s this misconception that if something is specific, it can’t be universal. But that’s not true. It can be specific and still be universal. [paraphrased from audio]
Beneath the plot mechanics of testimony, protest, and grand jury decisions, Thomas has named the moral project that holds the book together. Khalil is written as a person with a history and people who loved him, not as the drug dealer the media frames him as after his death.
As an author, one of the things I work towards is humanizing young Black people, because so often this country has dehumanized. [paraphrased from audio]