{"id":56970,"date":"2018-11-01T01:44:47","date_gmt":"2018-11-01T01:44:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=56970"},"modified":"2018-11-01T01:44:47","modified_gmt":"2018-11-01T01:44:47","slug":"the-hate-u-gives-amandla-stenberg-on-bringing-black-lives-matter-to-the-box-office","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=56970","title":{"rendered":"The Hate U Give’s Amandla Stenberg on bringing Black Lives Matter to the box office"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Hate U Give’s<\/strong> Amandla Stenberg on bringing Black Lives Matter to the box office<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Guardian<\/a>
\n2018-10-19<\/p>\n

Steve Rose<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

\"Amandla<\/a><\/p>\n

Stenberg is the star of a new adaptation of the YA novel phenomenon. The actor, and the film\u2019s director, discuss cinema\u2019s new generation of resistance <\/em><\/p>\n

Any resemblance between The Hate U Give<\/em><\/a> and your average teen movie evaporates about 20 minutes in, when 16-year-old Starr Carter, played by Amandla Stenberg, witnesses a police officer shoot dead her friend Khalil at point-blank range. By this stage, Starr\u2019s father has already given her The Talk, the time-honoured ritual where African-American parents instruct their children how to behave if stopped by the police: be polite, stay calm, put your hands where they can see them. When their car is pulled over, Starr follows the drill. Khalil reaches for a hairbrush. The police officer thinks it\u2019s a gun. That\u2019s all it takes.<\/p>\n

The Hate U Give<\/em> is fictional<\/a>, but barely. To see the stricken expression on Stenberg\u2019s face during the shooting scene is to recall Diamond Reynolds, partner of Philando Castile, who livestreamed the aftermath of Castile\u2019s<\/a> 2016 police shooting from the passenger seat while he bled to death beside her. The victims\u2019 names have almost become a mantra: Castile, Freddie Gray, Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland<\/a> \u2013 all young African Americans killed by law enforcement, each an avoidable tragedy.<\/p>\n

\u201cI learned really early on what it feels like to be black in an environment in which no one looks like you,\u201d she says, \u201cAnd I learned how to be very intentional of how I presented myself in order to fit in.\u201d Code-switching<\/a> \u2013 that capacity to alter your behaviour according to the company you\u2019re in \u2013 is something that people of colour are especially familiar with, she continues. \u201cBecause you have the cognisance that if you are completely transparent about who you are in a space that doesn\u2019t accept you for who you are, it\u2019ll be detrimental to your ability to succeed. That\u2019s just a fact of growing up in a country that is still based on white institutions,\u201d she says. It can work both ways, Stenberg points out: her mother is African American and her father is Danish. \u201cHe was one of the only white people in our neighbourhood, so what I was experiencing at school, he was experiencing at home.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stenberg is the star of a new adaptation of the YA novel phenomenon. The actor, and the film\u2019s director, discuss cinema\u2019s new generation of resistance <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,1196,8,23674,20],"tags":[20697,29043,2103],"class_list":["post-56970","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-social-justice","category-usa","tag-amandla-stenberg","tag-steve-rose","tag-the-guardian"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56970","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56970"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56970\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56971,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56970\/revisions\/56971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}