New Crop of Young Adult Novels Explores Race and Police Brutality

Angie Thomas started writing her young-adult novel, The Hate U Give, in reaction to a fatal shooting
that happened some 2,000 miles away. But 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 cannot understand that some of her white classmates said he had probably deserved it.
She responded with a short story about a teenage girl who starts activism after a white officer
shoots her childhood best friend.
That story became 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 childrens books that use fiction
to address police shootings of unarmed black teenagers debuted at the top of The New York
Timess 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 that the rapper Tupac Shakur coined, 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, its a reflection of what were 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 received a gun shot by a police officer,
as a way to process his depression and rage after Trayvon Martin died in Florida in 2012.
This fall, Crown Books for Young Readers will publish Nic Stones 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.
Teachers and librarians across the country have embraced the new body of childrens 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 Magoons How It Went Down, are protagonists in high school classrooms to talk about racial
inequality.
Kids have so many questions, and they want to engage on these topics, said Deborah Taylor, a
youth librarian in Baltimore. We 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 childrens book industry is struggling to
address the lack of diversity in the stories it publishes, and the scarcity of childrens books by
African-American authors.
Nonfinction covers the epidemic of police violence against unarmed African-Americans, in books
like Ta-Nehisi Coatess Between the World and Me, which won the National Book Award, and Wesley
Lowerys They Cant Kill Us All. But childrens book authors have only recently begun to tackle the
subject in greater numbers.
(adapted from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/19/books/review/black-lives-matter-teenage-
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