Starr Carter slides her feet into her favorite pair of Air Jordans—black retro Space Jam XIs— before hopping into her mother’s car and making the long trek to school. They pass the black-owned grocery stores, restaurants, barber shops, and “project” apartment buildings that line the weathered streets of Garden Heights. As they travel to the suburbs, the scenery transforms into mansions, luxury cars, and white people walking their dogs. The car stops in front of Starr’s ritzy private high school, Williamson Prep. She says goodbye to her mother and morphs into who she calls “Starr version two.” This Starr doesn’t speak with hood slang; she’s mild-mannered, non-confrontational, and always has a warm smile, even for the rich white students who make fried-chicken jokes around her. The only other things that survive the transition from “Garden Heights Starr” to “Williamson Starr” are her Jordans, the shoes that earn her style points in both places. Otherwise, “I gotta keep it separate,” Starr the narrator informs viewers. “That means flipping the switch in my brain.”


Adapted from Angie Thomas’s critically acclaimed YA novel by the same name, The Hate U Give is a film about Starr (played by Amandla Stenberg), a black teenager who sees her childhood best friend, Khalil (Algee Smith), get shot and killed by a police officer after a routine traffic stop goes horribly wrong. Starr is then forced to decide whether she’ll adhere to the code of the street and keep silent about what she saw, or if she’ll testify in front of a grand jury and join a burgeoning movement to end anti-black violence and police misconduct in communities like hers. Poignantly and judiciously rendered, The Hate U Give has received praise from critics and moviegoers during its limited run and opens in theaters across the U.S. on Friday.

At its core, The Hate U Give is a meditation on the toll of “code switching”—or moving between multiple social identities depending on the context—for black girls in particular. By the time viewers encounter Starr, she has mastered the practice. For years, she has been showing up to school as a fraction of herself while also giving more than 100 percent to make up for the fact that she’s black, female, and from a working-class neighborhood. Typically, cinematic representations of code switching deal with external changes: one’s use of language, hairstyling and dress, comportment, and so forth. But The Hate U Give’s treatment of identity politics goes beyond the outward social performance to depict both the weight of bearing witness and the emotional toll of burying trauma. Crucially, the adaptation also argues for the importance of supporting girls who want to play an active role in the movement for black lives.

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Code switching can sometimes be an act of survival. In Starr’s case, the first-ever emergence of her “version two” occurred after a devastating incident, a few years before the start of the film: She saw her other best friend, Natasha (Starr, Natasha, and Khalil called themselves The Hood Trio), get gunned down in front of her after a gang member opened fire on the block. The girls were only 10 years old. Viewers later learn that Starr not only witnessed the murder, but she could also identify the tattooed shooter; yet, she remained silent to protect herself. “I didn’t snitch,” Starr says with hints of both pride and shame in her voice when, years later, she finally tells her parents her secret. Immediately after Natasha’s murder, Starr’s parents send her to a private school in the white suburbs. Thus, for Starr, the horror of seeing her friend killed, the silence demanded by the law of the street, and her earliest acts of code switching in elementary school are intertwined.


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https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/10/the-hate-u-give-movie-starr-carter-black-girlhood/573319/