Entertainment

Lived It, Wrote It and Now Filmed It

When Angie Thomas first began writing “The Hate U Give,” her best-selling novel about a black teenager dealing with microaggressions and worse at a predominantly white prep school, she looked to movies for inspiration. “I wanted ‘The Hate U Give’ to be almost a girl version of ‘Boyz N the Hood,'” she remembered. “That movie was a huge influence on me. And I was like, are there any movies from that era, or even currently, that deal with black girls in situations like this?”

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Lived It, Wrote It and Now Filmed It
By
Robert Ito
, New York Times

When Angie Thomas first began writing “The Hate U Give,” her best-selling novel about a black teenager dealing with microaggressions and worse at a predominantly white prep school, she looked to movies for inspiration. “I wanted ‘The Hate U Give’ to be almost a girl version of ‘Boyz N the Hood,'” she remembered. “That movie was a huge influence on me. And I was like, are there any movies from that era, or even currently, that deal with black girls in situations like this?”

There have been plenty of stories about young black men and boys at white prep schools, whether in feature films (Gus Van Sant’s 2000 drama, “Finding Forrester”; the 2009 inspirational tale “The Blind Side,” starring Sandra Bullock), documentaries (“The Prep School Negro” from 2012; “Divided by Diversity” from 2016), television series (ABC’s “black-ish”) or music videos (Michael Jackson’s “was that what that was about?” 18-minute opus “Bad”). “American Promise,” the documentary about two boys navigating their way through Manhattan’s prestigious Dalton School, won a special jury prize at Sundance in 2013; “Hoop Dreams,” the 1994 film that tracked two teenage boys at Chicago’s St. Joseph High, is widely considered one of the greatest documentaries of all time.

But Thomas, 31, struggled to find a single film about a black girl coming of age under similar circumstances. The 2014 big-screen version of “Dear White People” takes place at an Ivy, for instance, while “black-ish” rarely hinted at a downside to Zoey Johnson’s white prep-school experience. So the aspiring writer pulled from her own experiences as a creative writing student at Belhaven University, a private college in Mississippi. Like the time a professor had everyone introduce themselves and say where they went over the summer. “They were talking about, I went to Africa, I went to Fiji,” Thomas said in a phone interview from her home in Jackson. “And I was like, I went nowhere, you know? I experienced how hot Mississippi can get in the summer. That was one of the moments where it hit me that I was different.”

That feeling of difference runs throughout the book — in it, Africa and Fiji became the Bahamas and “Harry Potter World” — and the new film. In the adaptation, Starr Carter (Amandla Stenberg) lives in a poor black neighborhood but attends high school in a rich white one. Striving to fit in both worlds, she constantly code switches between her true self and “Starr, Version 2,” her “approachable,” nonslang-speaking, never-angry alter ego. After meeting up with a childhood friend, Khalil, at a party near her home, Starr watches as Khalil is gunned down by a white police officer during a random traffic stop.

Other books have trod similar ground. In her 1972 memoir “Black Ice,” Lorene Cary recounted her experiences of isolation and bigotry at an elite New Hampshire boarding school; in Elaine Brown’s autobiography “A Taste of Power,” the former Black Panther Party chairwoman remembers doing everything she could to be “not like the other coloreds” as a student at an experimental school for “exceptional children” in Philadelphia. “But in recent memory,” said Darnell Hunt, dean of social sciences and professor of sociology and African-American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, “I’m not aware of any films that foreground this theme in the same way that ‘The Hate U Give’ does.”

Of course, it helped that Thomas lived it. The experience was also familiar to the film’s director, George Tillman Jr. (“Barbershop,” “Notorious”), and Stenberg (“Everything, Everything,” “The Hunger Games”), both of whom had also attended predominantly white schools growing up. “I believe there were four girls of color in our entire sixth grade,” Stenberg said. “And no boys of color. So I definitely felt there were parts of myself that I couldn’t share at school.” For Starr, the death of her longtime friend ultimately compels her to speak out against racism and police violence. For Thomas, it was the shooting death of Oscar Grant III by a white transit police officer in 2009 (which itself formed the basis of director Ryan Coogler’s award-winning 2013 film “Fruitvale Station”) that inspired her, in college, to write the short story that would become “The Hate U Give.” Many of her classmates, she recalled, “either weren’t aware of the shooting, or didn’t care about it, or wrote it off. They were like, ‘Well, maybe he deserved it. He was an ex-con, why are people so upset?’ I was so angry.”

Stenberg, 19, recalled similar experiences as a student at Wildwood, a private school in West Los Angeles. “I picked up from my peers that my blackness was not a good thing, or made me too different,” she said by phone. “But at the same time, they were bumping ‘Yeezus’ everyday, and wearing Jordan.” For a school project in 2015, she and a classmate, Quinn Masterson, created “Don’t Cash Crop my Cornrows,” a short video that called out the appropriation of cornrows by celebrities like Christina Aguilera and James Franco, among others (the video quickly went viral). “I think there was some discomfort about it at school,” she said.

Stenberg shared her experiences with Tillman and Thomas, and together the three of them created a chart of “behaviors and perspectives” that ranged from Starr at home (the girl who got “The Talk” from her dad about how to avoid getting shot when you’re stopped by a police officer) to Starr at school (the girl who would never tell her white friends about “The Talk”). “It was a scale going from 1 to 5,” Stenberg said.

Tillman, 49, also pulled from his own school memories growing up in Milwaukee — a party he shouldn’t have gone to, one with gunfire — to create some of the film’s pivotal scenes. “Just like the movie, there was a shooting,” he said. “As soon as I read that in the book, I was able to relate to exactly what she was trying to do.”

All three of them could recognize Hailey, the blond student who goes from being one of Starr’s closest friends to the poster child for white privilege, blaming Khalil for getting shot and icing out Starr when she posts a grisly image of Emmett Till on her Tumblr.

“I knew a lot of Haileys growing up!” Tillman said, laughing. “I probably still know Haileys.”

Thomas acknowledged that there are “real-life Haileys who I know, who personally read the book, and did not recognize that they were real-life Haileys until I pointed it out to them.” She added: “They were like, ‘So, who is this? Is this based on someone?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, you may want to look in a mirror.'” And all three of them could empathize with Starr’s awakening. Thomas recalled her ah-ha moment in college when she realized that, notwithstanding “Twilight” and its gazillions of fans, not all heroes of young-adult novels had to be white (she credits a professor, the novelist Howard Bahr, for the revelation). “When I first started writing in that program, I was writing white characters,” she said. “I was whitewashing my own stories. It wasn’t until I started writing this short story that I realized, wow, I could use my art as my activism.”

So why haven’t there been more movies about young women like Starr? “Umm, patriarchy?” Thomas said.

“A lot of times, with movies and books and storytelling, the focus is on young black men, and I get why, because they are so endangered in so many ways,” she continued. “But we can also talk about the trauma that black girls experience.”

Stenberg agreed. “It’s probably because we have such a huge problem with representation of nuanced stories about women, period,” she said. “And I think it’s something we need to continuously strive for and demand.”

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